Plate tectonics coming of age
Thursday, November 24, 2011 - 08:31
in Earth & Climate
(PhysOrg.com) -- Plate tectonics in its current form is believed to have started one billion years ago. A study of two billion year old rocks from African gold mines has now shown that the same process of subduction we observe today as a by-product of these large-scale continental movements, was already present on Earth more than two billion years ago. Experiments with X-rays at the ESRF have contributed to this discovery which has been published on 20 November 2011 in Nature Geoscience.