More Than a Billion Years of Earth’s History Is Missing – Scientists May Finally Know Why

Earth’s rocks are missing more than a billion years of history in some places, and the slow rise and fall of continents may explain how those chapters disappeared.

A study led by University of Wollongong (UOW) PhD candidate Santosh Dhungana suggests that the slow rise and fall of continents helped create the Great Unconformity, a vast gap in Earth’s geological record. Published in Nature, the research links this missing history to currents of hot rock in the mantle that moved continents vertically over hundreds of millions of years.

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