🔬 Science 2d ago · Jacek Krywko

The missing 500 million: Cosmic bombardment melted Earth's first crust

Ars Technica Science
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The missing 500 million: Cosmic bombardment melted Earth's first crust
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Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don't agree on how they formed. "The continents started appearing around about four billion years ago—that's the oldest continental rock we know about,” said Tim Johnson, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “The Earth is four and a half billion years old, so why they started appearing then is unknown, as is the mechanism to make that continental crust."
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