#continental-crust

#continental-crust

These scraps of continental crust are found in the middle of oceans, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest continent. Scientists have been mystified for decades by how they came to be there; the fragments were even used as an argument against plate tectonics, says Joao Duarte, a geologist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. But a recent study in Nature Geoscience suggests that these misplaced fragments fit just fine within our understanding of plate tectonics and actually