About 1,000 million years of Earth’s geological history have been lost without a trace.
Geologists call this period the “Great Unconformity”.
This period was first discovered in 1869. It was discovered by John Wesley Powell, a geologist, while studying the rocks on the wall of the Grand Canyon in the United States.
In geology, time is defined by the layers of sediment in rock formations. Sedimentary rocks formed after sedimentation can be seen as layers of different colors depending on the age of sedimentation.
When studying the rock layers on the wall of the Grand Canyon canyon, they discovered that between the 3,000-million-year-old layer and the 550-million-year-old layer, about 1,000 million years of rock layers are missing.
The strange thing is that the end of this lost period, 550 million years ago, was a few million years before the Cambrian explosion, when many new species suddenly appeared on Earth.
This “Great Unconformity” can be clearly seen in the Grand Canyon, and similar missing rock layers can be found in other regions.
Based on this fact, some geologists think that the event that caused the disappearance of the geological layer was caused by a big event that happened at the same time all over the world.
According to a recent research paper, this disappearance may not have been a single event but a series of events that happened around the world at the same time.
Also, the culprit of all these processes is related to the supercontinent called Rodinia,” which existed about a thousand years ago.
This research paper is presented based on a method called Thermochronology, which is a method of determining the age of rocks. In this method, the atoms in the rocks are studied in detail, and the temperature was recalculated when these rocks were formed.
Using this method, the United States studied rock layers in the state of Colorado. In these rock layers, the rock layer at the bottom was formed more than 1000 million years ago, and the layer above it was formed after 510 million years.
At this time, what the scholars found was that the bottom rock layer was pushed about 700 million years ago and came to the surface of the earth. After this, its upper surface is water. It was destroyed by wind erosion.
It is said that another new layer of rock has been deposited on top of this eroded rock layer.
In other words, the world’s rock mass that was lost is water. It was destroyed by wind erosion, and new layers of rock were deposited on top of it, so this intermediate layer is empty.
The erosion of these nearly 1,000 million-year-old rocks poses a challenge to scientists studying the evolution of life. Along with the destruction of these rock layers, fossils from these layers can also be lost or destroyed. So there are unknown gaps in the evolution of life.
Scholars believe that the large rock mass below the surface of the world is due to the supercontinent Rodinia.
This Rodinia came into existence earlier than the supercontinent Pangaea, which appeared after it.
This Rodinia supercontinent is thought to have been formed over millions of years after parts of a similar supercontinent drifted apart one by one.
During the period when these parts were blown away, the areas around the edges of these parts were covered in water and suffered wind erosion.
Once these continents came back together, mountain ranges such as the Himalayas formed where they collided. In these mountainous regions, due to the friction between each other, A lot of rocks are lost due to wind and water erosion.
In this Rodinia birth process, both In the process of splitting again, a lot of rock mass is lost. As a result, scholars consider that the “Great Unconformity” has occurred due to a number of events that happened in many places in recent times.
The research group presenting this paper is not the only one to come to this conclusion.
Scholars from the University of California (Santa Barbara) in the United States of America came to the same conclusion.
The discovery may provide answers to unsolved questions about the Cambrian explosion that Darwin presented.
Scientists have been trying for 200 years to answer the question of why so many new species suddenly appeared during this period. But now I will be able to give an answer.
