A fragment of continental crust has been postulated to underlie the young plume-related lavas of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius based on the recovery of Proterozoic zircons from basaltic beach sands. Here we document ...

Gondwana was an enormous supertarrane. At its peak, it represented a landmass of about 100 × 106 km2 in size, corresponding to approximately 64% of all land areas today. Gondwana assembled in the Middle Cambrian, merged ...

The notorious ~60° bend separating the Hawaiian and Emperor chains marked a prominent change in the motion of the Pacific plate at ~47 Ma (million years ago), but the origin of that change remains an outstanding controversy ...

A conspicuous 60° bend of the Hawaiian-Emperor Chain in the north-western Pacific Ocean has variously been interpreted as the result of an abrupt Pacific plate motion change in the Eocene (∼47 Ma), a rapid southward drift ...

Earth’s spin axis follows the maximum moment of inertia axis of mantle convection, with some delay due to adjustment of the rotational bulge. Here we compute this axis for geodynamic models based on subduction history, ...