The record of the continental lithosphere is patchy and incomplete; no known rock is older
than 4.02 Ga, and less than 5% of the rocks preserved are older than 3 Ga. In addition, there …

Sedimentary rocks and detrital minerals sample large areas of the continental crust, and
they are increasingly seen as a reliable archive for its global evolution. This study presents …

The formation and evolution of the landscape of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) is
debated because of uncertainties regarding dust provenance. We present a quantitative …

Over the past decades, rare earth elements (REE) and their radioactive isotopes have
received tremendous attention in sedimentary geochemistry, as tracers for the geological …

Abstract Models for when and how the continental crust was formed are constrained by
estimates in the rates of crustal growth. The record of events preserved in the continental …

The composition of the fine-grained matrix of glacial diamictites from the Mesoarchean,
Paleoproterozoic, Neoproterozoic, and Paleozoic, collected from four modern continents …

The widely accepted paradigm of Earth's geochemical evolution states that the successive
extraction of melts from the mantle over the past 4.5 billion years formed the continental …

Accretionary orogens are major sites of generation of continental crust but the spatial and
temporal distribution of crust generation within individual orogens remains poorly …

Lithium isotopes are increasingly used to trace both present-day and past weathering
processes at the surface of the Earth, and could potentially be used to evaluate the average …

The nature of Earth's earliest crust and crustal processes remain unresolved questions in
Precambrian geology. While some hypotheses suggest that plate tectonics began in the …