Researchers believe these fragments may represent the oldest known earthquakes on our planet.
Our Earth may seem extremely fragile, especially in the face of the climate crisis, but the Earth has been around for a very long time; Our planet is more than 4.5 billion years old. For centuries, scientists have been trying to peer into Earth’s past to understand what it looked like when it was very young, Science Alert writes.
Scientists now believe the answer lies in some of the oldest extensive remains of the earth’s surface, found in a remote corner of the southern African highlands known to geologists as the Barberton Greenstone Belt. Scientists have tried to unravel the geological formations here for a long time, but they were not very successful. Everything has changed in a new study.
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Scientists now believe that the key to unlocking “this code” lies in geologically young rocks lying at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of New Zealand. The study’s authors believe this sheds light on what our planet looked like in its youth.
The team, from Victoria University of Wellington, said their work began by creating a new, detailed geological map of part of the Barberton Greenstone Belt. As a result, they were able to detect a piece of ancient deep seafloor that formed approximately 3.3 billion years ago.
But there was something strange about this patch of seabed; scientists were focused on shedding light on the situation. The authors of the paper argue that our ancient Earth was not actually an extremely hot place without earthquakes, with a surface so weak that it could not form solid plates. Instead, the young Earth was constantly shaken by powerful earthquakes, which occur when one tectonic plate slides under another in the subduction zone as part of plate tectonics, just like today’s New Zealand.
In their studies, scientists examined beautiful barite crystals that crystallize as evaporite, or the remnants of bubbling mud deposits found on rocks deposited on the deep sea floor. Also upside down and mixed blocks of volcanic rock, silicon, sandstone and conglomerate. As a result, scientists realized that all these fragments were caused by powerful earthquakes along New Zealand’s largest fault.
In fact, the bedrock here is a mixture of sedimentary rocks deposited on the sea bed off the coast of New Zealand about 20 million years ago. This region is located on the edges of a deep ocean trench where the Pacific tectonic plate is sliding downward in a subduction zone, causing frequent powerful earthquakes. Scientists now insist that rocks in this area hold the key to the “geology of the Barberton Greenstone Belt.”
In simple terms, what was previously considered mysterious and “unreadable” turned out to be the remains of a giant landslide, with sediments from both land and shallow waters mixed with sediments deposited on the deep sea floor.
Scientists now believe that what’s hidden deep in the southwestern Pacific Ocean has echoes from a time soon after our planet’s creation. These fragments provide clues to the origin of the world and how it came to be as we know it today.
Previously Focus He wrote that scientists say early life on Earth was radically different from what it is today.
Source: Focus
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