WASHINGTON, April 22 (Xinhua) -- A new research published on Wednesday indicates that plate tectonics may have been well underway on Earth more than 3.2 billion years ago.
The research added a new dimension to an ongoing debate about exactly when plate tectonics began influencing the early evolution of the planet.
The research team led by Harvard researchers looked for clues of tectonic activity in ancient rocks in the over three-billion-year-old Australian rocks.
They found that these plates were moving at least 3.2 billion years ago on the early Earth. In a portion of the Pilbra Craton in Western Australia, one of the oldest pieces of the Earth's crust, scientists found a latitudinal drift of about 2.5 centimeters a year, and dated the motion to 3.2 billion years ago.
The researchers believe this shift is the earliest proof that modern-like plate motion happened between two to four billion years ago.
"Basically, this is one piece of geological evidence to extend the record of plate tectonics on Earth farther back in Earth history," said Alec Brenner, one of the paper's lead authors and member of Harvard's Paleomagnetics Lab.
"Based on the evidence we found, it looks like plate tectonics is a much more likely process to have occurred on the early Earth and that argues for an Earth that looks a lot more similar to today's than a lot of people think," Brenner said.
The findings were published in Science Advances. Enditem
