The oldest patch of undisturbed oceanic crust on Earth may lie deep beneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea – and at about 340 million years old, it beats the previous record by more than 100 ...

But new research suggests that even the oldest crust is disintegrating due to natural ... by this special form of subduction occurring near oceanic plates, revealing how the continents evolved ...

Initially, subduction of the shallowly-dipping oceanic Izanagi plate (flat-slab subduction) from the east led to thickening of the overriding NCC crust of the Eurasian plate as it was shortened ...

Therefore, oceanic crust never gets to age as much as continental crust, which almost never gets subducted and destroyed. The oldest oceanic crust is ~340 million years old. The oldest continental ...

One of the key indicators has been whether or not fragments of oceanic crust, generated at sea-floor spreading centers, are preserved in the planet's oldest crust. New research integrating what has ...

These old rocks record a time when Yellowstone was close to an ocean with an active subduction zone, where oceanic crust collides with ... there are four — from oldest to youngest, the Hadean ...