Large lump Earth’s crust It’s missing, but scientists have discovered where it is.
The world is constantly asking scientists baffling questions, and new technologies like space imaging are helping solve mysteries like: Water’s “scars” on the Earth’s surface.
Another mystery that has puzzled experts for more than a century is known as the “Great Unconformity,” which refers to a large slab of Earth’s crust missing from the geological record.
New evidence suggests their disappearance may have been the result of intense glacial erosion during a period known as “Snowball Earth,” when almost the entire planet was covered in ice.
As a result, gaps in the sedimentary record occur when earlier rocks are eroded away, causing a sudden change in rock age and being replaced by newer rocks.
This phenomenon was first observed in the Grand Canyon in Arizona in 1869. Experts noted a sudden change in the age of rocks and found that this was replicated in several places around the world, so the phenomenon was named the “Great Unconformity.”
One author study Glacial erosion has stripped away an average of 3-5 kilometers (2-3 miles) of rock worldwide, allowing them to calculate what has been “lost” from the records.
Lead study author Dr Brennin Keller of the Berkeley Geochronology Centre described the scale of rock loss as enormous, saying he and his colleagues estimate that 1 billion cubic kilometres (200 million cubic miles) of Precambrian material has been lost, based on the amount expected to be present.
Their theory suggests that much more erosion occurred before the start of the Phanerozoic era than experts originally thought, and they presented evidence that crystals from that era contain isotopes of hafnium and oxygen.
These isotypes are consistent with being eroded from older rocks and deposited at low temperatures, which their theory suggests may also be why there are so many asteroid craters less than 700 million years old, with only two older than that.
As for the rocks’ current location, it has been suggested that glaciers may have eroded the sedimentary rocks, washing them into the sea.
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