"... a pivotal event in our planet's history." This is an Inside Science story. Earth's first continents may have emerged from the oceans roughly 750 million years ...

The geological staying power of continents comes partly from their losing battle with the Earth's oceans over magnesium. Continents lose more than 20 percent of their initial mass to chemical ...

The continents may have first risen high above the oceans of the world about 3 billion years ago, researchers say. That's about a billion years earlier than geoscientists had suspected for the ...