Huge earthquakes shook the Earth more than 3 billion years ago

An aerial view of a fissure after two earthquakes struck Türkiye on February 22, 2023.

VCG via Getty Images

The world's most powerful earthquakes occur in subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another. When these plates stick together, pressure builds up in the Earth's crust – like a rubber band being stretched. When enough pressure builds up to overcome the friction holding the plates together—like a rubber band snapping—an earthquake occurs. Such an event is also known as a strong earthquake.

Strange rock deposits found in the Barberton Greenstone Belt preserve evidence of what may be the oldest massive earthquakes known to date.

The Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa formed at different times over a critical period of 800 million years, from 4.15 to 3.3 billion years ago, when Earth's tectonics shifted from a solid rocky surface to mobile plates.

The greenstone belt includes ancient rocks that formed or were deposited on the seafloor and were later tectonically thrust onto younger continental rocks. Overall, this tectonic belt still shows an undisturbed succession from seafloor lava to marine sediments, but in a new study, Simon Lamb of the Victoria University of Wellington and Cornel de Ronde, of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences in New Zealand, describe a chaotic rock. An unusual formation of the Barberton greenstone belt resulting from deposition along an active subduction zone.

According to the authors, the chaotic rock formation in the greenstone belt closely resembles the Great Marlborough Conglomerate, a geological formation found in the mountains of New Zealand.

Exposure to sharp subsidence of the Great Marlborough Conglomerate (Miocene) at Havers Creek, near… [+] Kekerengu, which contains large blocks of limestone.

Alexander Mackay (1841-1917)

About 24 million years ago, the sliding of the Pacific plate beneath the continental plate hosting Australia and New Zealand triggered a series of huge earthquakes. The shaking destabilized vast areas of the continental shelf, parts of which slid into deeper basins and formed rock deposits consisting of a chaotic series of well-rounded rocks to large, angular blocks, comprising shallow-water sediments and deep-sea volcanic rocks. . When tectonic plates collided, the conglomerate was eventually uplifted and incorporated into the New Zealand land mass.

Previous research has shown the chaotic rock formations found in the greenstone belt, which is more than 3.3 billion years old, formed during the impacts of large meteorites, but according to the new study, the extent and frequency of these deposits may indicate an unrealistically high impact rate on early Earth. . The new explanation for large undersea terrestrial deposits fits better with what we know about the Earth at that time.

The full paper, “Large-scale marine landslides in the Barberton greenstone belt, South Africa – evidence for subduction and major earthquakes in the Paleolithic” was published in the journal Geology and can be found online here.

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