Scientists believe they’ve discovered a window into the dawn of time on Earth, and it’s hidden beneath the Pacific Ocean.
A team led by geophysicist Simon Lamb of the University of Wellington and scientist Cornel de Ronde of GNS Science said the key to our past lies in a remote corner of South Africa and far on the seabed off the coast of New Zealand.
So what do these two sites located on different sides of the world have in common?
Together, they shed light on the nascent world and offer unexpected clues to the origins of the planet we know today—and possibly life itself.
Writing about The conversationthe scientists explained that their work began after de Ronde created a new, detailed geological map of an area known as the Barberton Greenstone Belt, which is located in the highlands of South Africa.
“The geological formations in this region have proven difficult to decipher, despite many attempts,” the two wrote.
They argue that the bedrock of the Belta contradicts our widely accepted understanding of plate tectonics at the time.
But they claim their new research has offered “the key to cracking this code”.
Part of the South African Barberton Greenstone Belt(International Geoheritage Commission)
De Ronde’s map reveals a fragment of the ancient deep-sea seafloor in the Barberton Greenstone Belt, created about 3.3 billion years ago when the world was only 1.2 billion years old.
“However, there was something very strange about this seabed,” Lamb and de Rond wrote.
“And it took our study of rocks laid down in New Zealand, at the other end of Earth’s long history, to figure that out.”
The two experts argue that the common understanding of the early Earth as a fiery ball of molten magma whose surface was too weak to form solid plates — and, in general, suffer from earthquakes — is wrong.
Rather, they argue that the young planet was constantly rocked by large earthquakes that were triggered whenever one tectonic plate slid beneath another in a subduction zone.
Looking at de Ronde’s map of the Barberton Greenstone Belt, they realized that its “disturbed” rock layers were reminiscent of more recent submarine landslides that had occurred in New Zealand.
These landslides are triggered by large earthquakes along the country’s largest fault, the Hikurangi subduction zone megathrust, where the bedrock is made up of a mixture of sedimentary rocks.
The Hikurangi Subduction Zone Projectwww.youtube.com
These rocks were originally laid down on the sea floor off the coast of New Zealand about 20 million years ago, along the edges of a deep ocean trench that was the site of frequent large earthquakes.
By examining the formation of this New Zealand bedrock, experts claim to have solved the mystery behind the formations of the Barberton Greenstone Belt.
Like its young successor, these structures were “a remnant of a giant landslide containing sediments deposited both on land and in very shallow waters mixed with those accumulated on the deep sea floor,” they concluded.
Put simply, if the rock layers in New Zealand were formed by earthquakes, so were those in the Barberton Greenstone Belt – undermining the theory that the early Earth was not equipped to withstand such tremors.
Additionally, Lamb and de Ronde suggest that their work “may have unlocked other mysteries,” as they point out, “Subduction zones are also associated with explosive volcanic eruptions.”
They cite the example of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga, which erupted in January 2022 with the energy of a “60 megaton atomic bomb” and sent a huge cloud of ash into space, through which more than 200,000 flashed over the next 11 hours lightning bolts.
“In the same volcanic region, underwater volcanoes erupt an extremely rare type of lava called boninite. It is the closest modern example of lava that was common on the early Earth,” they add.
Ash clouds pierced by light from the powerful volcanic eruption in 2022.(Geological Survey of Tonga via NOAA)
Lamb and de Ronde argue that the large amounts of volcanic ash found in the Barberton Greenstone Belt “may be an ancient record of such volcanic violence”.
And more interestingly, they suggest that the associated lightning strikes could potentially “create the crucible for life where the basic organic molecules are forged.”
In other words, subduction zones weren’t just the source of tectonic chaos, they may have been the spark that ignited the flame of life itself.
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