The Pilbara Craton is one of only two pieces of crust known to date back to the Archaean Eon (3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago) and hosts some of the oldest rocks on our planet.

By contrast, the Kaapvaal Craton of southern Africa paints a very different geological picture. Here, the lithosphere has experienced significant weakening, uplift, and even partial removal.

The Kaapvaal craton is the closest ancient continental crust to the Southwest Indian Ridge. But it’s also a whopping 1,200 miles away. To have reached the ridge, Liu and his colleagues propose that ...

This pushes back previous estimates of when the cratons first rose from the water, as various studies suggested that large-scale craton emergence took place roughly 2.5 billion years ago. "There ...

Large, robust, lens-shaped microfossils from the approximately 3.4 billion-year-old Kromberg Formation of the Kaapvaal Craton in eastern South Africa are not only among the oldest elaborate ...

They found that the Singhbhum Craton in eastern India first rose above the ocean around 3.3 billion to 3.2 billion years ago, earlier than previous estimates of 2.5 billion years ago.

But something about the cratons had long puzzled geologists. Some, such as the Kaapvaal craton in southern Africa, are topped by vast plateaus that are rimmed by dramatic escarpments.

Tarduno and his team analyzed rocks from the Kaapvaal craton, a region near the southern tip of Africa that hosts relatively pristine early Archean crust. (The Archean eon began about 3.8 billion ...

Until now, the oldest evidence of meteor impacts were 3.47 billion-year-old spherules, also from Pilbara Craton, and 3.45 billion-year-old fragments found in Kaapvaal Craton, in South Africa.

In a new investigation, the authors analyzed three diamonds from the Witwatersrand Supergroup of the Kaapvaal craton in South Africa. Based on the atomic arrangement of nitrogen, ...

This pushes back previous estimates of when the cratons first rose from the water, as various studies suggested that large-scale craton emergence took place roughly 2.5 billion years ago. "There ...