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Earth cutaway from core to exosphere.

In geology, a crust is the outermost layer of a rocky planet.

The crust of the Earth is composed of a great variety of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. The crust is underlain by the mantle. The upper part of the mantle is composed mostly of peridotite, a rock denser than rocks common in the overlying crust. The boundary between the crust and mantle is conventionally placed at the Mohorovicic discontinuity, a boundary defined by a contrast in seismic velocity. Earth's crust occupies less than 1% of Earth's volume.

The oceanic crust of the Earth is different from its continental crust. The oceanic crust is 5 km (3 mi) to 10 km (6 mi) thick^[1] and is composed primarily of basalt, diabase, and gabbro. The continental crust is typically from 30 km (20 mi) to 50 km (30 mi) thick, and it is mostly composed of less dense rocks than is the oceanic crust. Some of these less dense rocks, such as granite, are common in the continental crust but rare to absent in the oceanic crust.

The temperature of the crust increases with depth, reaching values typically in the range from about 500 °C (900 °F) to 1,000 °C (1,800 °F) at the boundary with the underlying mantle. The crust and underlying relatively rigid mantle make up the lithosphere. Because of convection in the underlying plastic, although non-molten, upper mantle and asthenosphere, the lithosphere is broken into tectonic plates that move.

Earth is considered to have differentiated from an aggregate of planetesimals into its core, mantle and crust within about 100 million years of the formation of the planet, 4.6 billion years ago. The primordial crust was very thin, and was likely recycled by much more vigorous plate tectonics and destroyed by significant asteroid impacts, which were much more common in the early stages of the solar system. There is a theory that the Moon was formed by one such very large impact.

The Earth has likely always had some form of basaltic oceanic crust, but there is evidence it has also had continental style crust for as long as 3.8 to 3.9 billion years. The oldest crust on Earth is the Narryer Gneiss Terrane in Western Australia at 3.9 billion years, and certain parts of the Canadian Shield and the Fennoscandian Shield are also of this age.

The majority of the current Earth's continental crust was formed primarily between 4.6 billion years and 3.9 billion years ago, in the Hadean. The vast majority of rocks of this age are located in cratons where the crust is up to 70 km (40 mi) thick. The lower density of the continental crust as compared to the oceanic crust prevents it being destroyed by subduction. Crust formation is linked to periods of intense orogeny or mountain building; these periods coincide with the formation of the supercontinents such as Rodinia, Pangaea and Gondwana. The crust forms not so much by accumulation of granite and metamorphic fold belts, but by depletion of the mantle to form buoyant lithospheric mantle.

The common rock constituents of the Earth's crust are nearly all oxides; chlorine, sulfur and fluorine are the only important exceptions to this and their total amount in any rock is usually much less than 1%. F. W. Clarke calculated that a little more than 47% of the Earth's crust consists of oxygen. It occurs principally in combination as oxides, of which the chief are silicon, aluminium, iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium oxides. Silica is a major constituent of the crust occurring as the silicate minerals, which are the most common minerals of igneous and metamorphic rocks. From a computation based on 1672 analyses of all kinds of rocks Clarke arrived at the following as the average percentage composition by mass:

Plates in the crust of the earth, according to the plate tectonics theory

All the other constituents occur only in very small quantities, and total less than 1%.^[2]. Density for the upper crust varies between 2.69 g/cm³ and 2.74 g/cm³ and for lower crust between 3.0 g/cm³ and 3.25 g/cm^3[1].

• Continental drift
• Plate tectonics

1. ^ ^{a b} Structure and composition of the Earth. Australian Museum Online. Retrieved on 2007-09-14.
2. ^ This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition article "Petrology", a publication now in the public domain.

• USGS Crust Thickness Map