Animation shows ‘dance’ of Earth’s tectonic plates over 1.8 billion years

The existence of plate tectonics is a unique feature that distinguishes Earth from the other planets in the Solar System and, at least, from all known worlds so far. Our planet’s solid, fragmented crust is divided into blocks (plates) that occasionally meet, forming everything from high mountains to ocean-filled chasms.

A recent study published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers shows this dramatic dance of rock, water, ice and fire. It is the most distant geological record ever recorded on Earth. An international team of scientists led by Xianzhi Cao of the Ocean University of China mapped our planet for the last 40% of its history.

Animated shows according to research “a new 1.8 Ga full plate tectonic reconstruction [bilhões de anos] to the present day”The presentation combines three previously published tectonic models: a more comprehensive model covering plate motion from 1.8 Ga to present, and two other models focusing specifically on continental drift and covering the late Paleoproterozoic to Mesoproterozoic periods.

The dance of the tectonic plates on Earth

The “ballet” begins with the static members that make up our current world map. Soon, a series of rotational movements begin as India rapidly drifts southward with packets from Southeast Asia. At this point, South America and Africa come together to form the ancient continent of Gondwana in the Southern Hemisphere.

But about 200 million years ago, while dinosaurs roamed the Earth’s surface, a shocking new encounter connected Gondwana (which encompassed North America, Europe, and parts of Asia) to Laurasia, forming the supercontinent called Pangea, surrounded by a vast Panthalassa ocean.

As the dance continues, an even older continent, Rodinia, which provided the land masses that would form Pangea, resurfaces in the form of its primitive components Laurasia and Gondwana. formed today’s continents about 175 million years ago.

What good is it to map the world’s past?

Modeling Earth’s past is fundamental to understanding the ongoing interactions between the planet’s inner layers (mantle and core) and outer layers (crust, atmosphere, and oceans). The two systems interact in complex ways and affect each other in different ways.

One of these feedbacks can explain How the nutrients necessary for the formation of life became available over timeand how this affected the evolution of living things. In this sense, the first evidence for the existence of complex cells with nuclei dates back 1.65 billion years.

This puts the finding at a time when another supercontinent, Nuna, was formed during the Proterozoic. The team now wants to test whether the mountains that emerged at that time provided the necessary elements for the evolution of complex cellular organisms.

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