The Earth’s crust is disappearing right beneath our feet – and most people don’t even realise it. Now, if you’re a geologist, ...

Our results demonstrate that long-term recycling of dense oceanic crust naturally leads to the formation of thermochemical piles with seismic characteristics similar to the LLSVPs. The extent to which ...

Pearce, J.A. (2008) Geochemical Fingerprinting of Oceanic Basalts with Applications to Ophiolite Classification and the Search for Archean Oceanic Crust. Lithos, 100, 14-48.

They also show positive Nb and Ta anomalies, typical of oceanic island basalts (OIBs) emplaced by mantle plume dynamics. These geochemical characteristics are compatible with an enriched, deep-seated ...

When plates collide, oceanic crust will be subducted under continental crust, recycling it back into the mantle. Therefore, oceanic crust never gets to age as much as continental crust, which almost ...

The thickness of continental crust — the part of Earth’s crust that forms land masses and continents — plays an important role in everything from the gradual movement of continents to the evolution of ...

The occurrences of all these rocks indicate that the Indosinian orogeny affected only the ancient continental crust components, without the addition of any juvenile components newly generated from ...

Second, continental crust is older (as old as 4.0 billion years) and buoyant (about 2.7 g/cm 3), and usually cannot easily subduct, whilst oceanic crust is younger (<200 million years), denser ...

Their findings, besides being deliciously intriguing, could have implications for models of how the oceanic crust forms and moves. Related: Earth's 8 biggest mysteries You may like ...

The oceanic crust moves away from the ridge on the diverging plates and may eventually plunge beneath another plate at a subduction zone. Volcanic island arcs such as the Aleutian Islands, or mountain ...

Life in a global conveyor Oceanic crust has been made almost continuously for 3.8 billion years at mid-ocean ridges, a network of volcanoes that stretches 40,000 miles around the planet.