At divergent boundaries, plates separate, forming a narrow rift valley. Here, geysers spurt super-heated water, and magma, or molten rock, rises from the mantle and solidifies into basalt, forming new crust. Thus, at divergent boundaries, oceanic crust is created.
The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called Determining the Age of the Earth (click the link to see a table of contents). Published earlier this year, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. In the collection, this introduction appears with the title, “Stumbling Toward an Understanding of Geologic Timescales.”
