An international team led by researchers from the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN-CSIC) has identified a key mechanism that has shaped Earth’s continents over billions of years. This mechanism is the deep re-lamination of subducted continental crust, a process that explains the origin of certain magmas and offers a new perspective on continental evolution from the Archean (between 3.8 and 2.5 billion years ago) to recent times.

The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, combines numerical geodynamic modeling and high-pressure experiments to unravel how fragments of continental crust can give rise to hybrid magmas that fuel major magmatic events following continental collisions, generating new crust.

During continental collisions, one plate sinks beneath another—a process known as subduction. This study demonstrates that the less dense crust breaks away from the subducted plate and rises again, becoming integrated into the lithospheric mantle of the overlying plate in a process called relamination.