Much of the Earth's mantle was melted in the Moon-forming impact. Gases that were not partially soluble in the melt, such as water and CO2, formed a thick, deep atmosphere surrounding the post-impact Earth. This atmosphere was opaque to thermal radiation, allowing heat to escape to space only at the runaway greenhouse threshold of approximately 100 W m(-2). The duration of this runaway greenhou...

Much of the Earth’s mantle was melted in the Moon-forming impact. Gases that were not partially soluble in the melt, such as water and CO2, formed a thick, deep atmosphere surrounding the postimpact Earth. This atmosphere was opaque to thermal radiation, allowing heat to escape to space only at the runaway greenhouse threshold of approximately 100 W m−2. The duration of this runaway greenhouse ...

The continental crust is 41.4 km thick on average and covers 39% of the Earth’s surface. Information from the isotopic and trace element composition of >4-billion-yearold (Ga) zircon grains and the evolution of mantle isotopic reservoirs indicates that 75%, and possibly more, of the continental crust was created before 2.5 Ga (Harrison 2009; Belousova et al. 2010). Thus, the continental crust i...

The current paradigm argues the Moon formed after a giant impact that produced a deep lunar magma ocean (LMO). After a period of turbulent convection, the LMO experienced fractional crystallization, causing the initially peridotitic liquid to evolve to a plagioclase-saturated ferrobasalt. The lunar crust, much of which comprises 93-98% pure anorthosite [1,2], formed by flotation of positively b...

Biological soil crusts play important ecological functions in arid and semi-arid regions, while different crust successional patterns appeared in different regions. Therefore in this study, the environmental conditions between Shapotou (with cyanobacterial, lichen and moss crusts) and Dalate Banner (with only cyanobacterial and moss crusts) regions of China were compared to investigate why lich...

High-quality seismic data recorded during the 1999 Taiwan Chi-Chi earthquake (Mw=7.6) show that a smallscale orogenic process of both mountain-building and crust-thickening was simultaneously accomplished along one set of crustal-scale conjugated faults. Mountain-building near the surface was primarily produced by the main shock along an eastward low-angle thrust fault in the upper crust. In th...

The neutron star crust, the 1 kilometer region on the surface composed of nuclei and superfluid neutrons, is the physical location of the majority of the phenomena observed in neutron stars. The composition of the crust is a fundamental input for the evolution of isolated and accreting neutron stars, and is important for the description of rp-process nucleosynthesis, gravitational waves generat...

The East African Orogen (EAO) is one of Earth’s great collision zones, where East and West Gondwana collided to form the supercontinent ‘Greater Gondwana’ or ‘Pannotia’ at the end of Neoproterozoic time. There is now sufficient Nd isotopic data for basement rocks of the EAO to yield a useful summary. A total of 449 samples were gleaned from the literature, recalculated to a common value for the...

The strong electric field at the surface of a strange star is discussed, and a self-consistent model is proposed to calculate its capability of supporting a “normal” nuclear material crust.We find that the electric field is already not able to support the crust even when the bottom density of the crust is still considerably lower than the neutron drip point, which means that it is not the neutr...

Seismic structure beneath the contiguous U.S. was imaged with multimode receiver function stacking and inversion of Rayleigh wave dispersion and ellipticity measurements. Crust thickness and elevation are weakly correlated across the contiguous U.S., but the correlation is ~3–4 times greater for separate areas east and west of the Rocky Mountain Front (RMF). Greater lower crustal shear velociti...