Tracking the birth of a super continent

By Huaiyu Yuan, Macquarie University

Underneath the northern city of Dongxin in China, we have discovered what might be the 2 billion year old birthmarks of the first giant continent on Earth.

The ancient dipping structure in the planet’s crust appears to be the effect of an early collision between two continental masses such as those that created the Himalayas – and may record the origin of the global system of plate tectonics that still exists today.

When do tectonic plates start?

Plate tectonics is one of the major scientific developments in the last century. He explains how the Earth’s crust is made of massive rocky “plates” floating on the interior of the molten planet, which move slowly. These movements are responsible for earthquakes and mountain ranges.

Earth is the only planet we know with plate tectonics. The plate movement gradually rotates the elements between the interior of the planet, the surface and the atmosphere, creating the resources and environment that make human life possible.

At some point in the deep past, plate tectonics began with the coldness of the earth. When this happened, however, it remained controversial. Dates spanning three quarters of Earth’s history have been suggested, from the Hadion Ion (between 4.5 billion and 4 billion years ago) to the late Protozoic (less than a billion years ago).

Many of these dates come from isolated samples that show individual sheets. However, plate tectonics is a global phenomenon in which plates interact with each other. We studied one of these early interactions: a collision in what is now northern China, where the edge of one plate was pushed up while the other was pushed down.

Moho Dipping

Our new study indicates that plate tectonics globally started somewhere between 2 billion and 1.8 billion years ago. The research, published in Science Advances, was conducted by an international team from China, Germany and Australia, led by Wan Po of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS).

A global network of ancient collisions that show the creation of the Greater Continental Nona. Credit: Wan et al. Science Advances, Author Submitted

We studied the geologists’ area called the Ordos Block, which is part of northern China craton, which is a very stable part of the Asian continent that accommodates parts of northeastern China, Mongolia and North Korea.

In April 2019, we deployed 609 spaced seismic recording stations every 500 meters along a 300 km line. By combining earthquake data from these stations, we were able to create a detailed picture of the Earth’s crust in this region.

Under the city of Dongsheng, we found a feature called Moho Dipping where the bottom of the Earth’s crust drops from about 35 km to over 50 km at a horizontal distance of only 40 km.

This dipping structure looks almost identical to what is found under the Himalayas, but is about 2 billion years old.

Universal style

Next, we collected seismic evidence from other studies around the world for similar Moho compositions that are about the same age. By putting notes from six continents together, we can create an image of the ancient Great Nona.

Nonna (sometimes called Colombia) is believed to consist of parts of most continents today. If Nuna is the first super continent, then we can interpret these tectonic collisions that occurred about 2 billion years ago as the oldest evidence of plate tectonics in the global sense. Although such collisions may have occurred here and there early, plate tectonics may not have become a global network until this time.

Huaiyu Yuan, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Macquarie University

This article was originally republished from the conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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