The researchers built a new simulation that reveals how Earth’s appearance has changed over a billion-year period as tectonic plates are constantly shifting.
Unlike all the other rocky planets in the Solar System, the Earth’s surface is like a giant jigsaw puzzle with pieces that are constantly shifting. Each jigsaw is a tectonic plate that makes up the planet’s crust and the soft, but equally hard, mantle underneath. These tectonic plates move at speeds comparable to fingers growing, crashing, pushing, sinking, or overlapping, forming the appearance of the Earth.
The surface of the Earth is like a giant jigsaw puzzle with pieces that are constantly shifting.
Half a century ago, the tectonic plate hypothesis was received with skepticism by the scientific community. Now, in a paper published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, scientists can accurately reconstruct the path of the Earth’s tectonic plates over the past billion years.
Previous computer models have only reconstructed the movements of the continents, showing them drifting in a less vivid blue ocean background. This time, the researchers tried a new approach. They combined magnetic field data, which reveals the position of rocks and soil relative to the magnetic poles millions of years ago, with geographic data describing how tectonic plates interact along their boundaries. The result is a highly reliable simulation that shows the displacements of the entire tectonic plate, including continents and oceans, and how they interact with each other.
Over the past decade, researchers have carried out a similar reconstruction process, but with a limited geological time frame. This is the first time that scientists have built a simulation in a continuous time equal to one-fifth of Earth’s history. This research is of great importance to geoscientists, because plate tectonics control or influence everything that happens on Earth. The process that creates mountains, continents and oceans, determines the distribution of life, carbon burials and eruptions, and coordinates Earth’s climate in the long-term, according to Andrew Merdith, a geoscientist at the University of Claude Bernard, Lyon 1, study leader.
Graphic depicting the movement of tectonic plates. (Video: Earth-Science Reviews).