A study reveals that the oldest continental crust on Earth is slowly being broken up by shifting tectonic forces.

Cratons, the formerly stable parts of Earth's crust, are breaking down. The Week. US Edition. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE. Less than $3 per week.

Cratons are the most ancient, stable pieces of tectonic plates, but even these geological formations can change over time. A new study details how the North American plate is “dripping” into ...

Cratons are believed to be the longest-lived regions of the Earth, but a new study shows how dynamic processes can cause their eventual disintegration.

Cratons are some of Earth’s oldest and most stable structures. They formed no later than the Proterozoic era, over 540 million years ago, and some are even older, dating back over 2 billion years.

“Cratons are the oldest cores of continents, so they have been sitting near the Earth’s surface for billions of years,” says Claire Currie, a geophysicist at the University of Alberta, who ...

The Earth's continents contain cratons, which are ancient and stable pieces of the crust that very rarely change and deform. Any changes to cratons happen over a long geologic timescale.

The best place to look for ancient craters is in regions of the Earth known as cratons—large, geologically stable stretches ...

This process influences the formation of sublithospheric diamonds and plays a role in the long-term evolution of cratons—ancient stable parts of the continental lithosphere.

An artist's conception of the Earth as it may have appeared 466 million years agoOliver Hull/Monash University If astronomers had been walking the Earth 466 million years ago, they may have had ...

At the center of this story lie the cratons, large blocks of mostly crystalline rock that typically occupy the interiors of continents. They are the oldest fragments of Earth’s crust, with many ...

Cratons, considered the oldest and most stable parts of Earth’s crust, were once thought to be immovable. However, this new evidence suggests otherwise, highlighting a far more dynamic and ...