An understanding of the formation of new continental crust provides an important guide to locating the oldest terrestrial rocks and minerals. We evaluated the crustal thicknesses of the thinnest stable continental crust ...

We compile a 3.7-b.yr.-long time series of ultramafic and mafic rocks including extrusives and shallow intrusives (dikes and sills). We infer that peaks in the time series represent mantle plume events. Rocks erupted from ...