Earth’s continents may owe their existence to bombardment from outer space
Rather than forces within
The earth is a poor archivist. The rigid tectonic plates of its outer layers are continuously in motion, sliding over one another to swallow almost all records of the past, melting them into the mantle and then casting them anew. This makes it difficult to reconstruct the 4.5bn-year-old planet’s formative years.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Impact creator”
From the August 13th 2022 edition
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