Rock weathering and plate tectonics are vital to life. They both regulate the planet's surface temperature and provide bio-essential nutrients. But how and when these critical processes began on ...

Emerging evidence suggests that plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth's crust, may have begun much earlier than ...

Earth surface is covered with rigid plates that move, crash into each other and dive into the planet's interior. But when did ...

"We start to see zircon structures that start to look more and more like what we see in subduction zones today," study author Nadja Drabon, an Earth and planetary scientist at Harvard University ...

Go back before 4.03 billion years, to the Hadean eon, and the rock record has completely vanished. The first half billion ...

Institute of Fluid Dynamics, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Bautzner Landstrasse 400, D-01328 Dresden, Germany ...