Earth's mountains disappeared for a billion years, and then life stopped evolving

[Judi Lynn]

By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 3 hours ago

A dead supercontinent may be to blame.



The supercontinent of Nuna-Rodinia broke up at the end of the Proterozoic era, ending a billion years of no new mountain formation, a new study says.
(Image: © Fama Clamosa/ CC 4.0)

Earth, like so many of its human inhabitants, may have experienced a mid-life crisis that culminated in baldness. But it wasn't a receding hairline our planet had to worry about; it was a receding skyline.

For nearly a billion years during our planet's "middle age" (1.8 billion to 0.8 billion years ago), Earth's mountains literally stopped growing, while erosion wore down existing peaks to stumps, according to a study published Feb. 11 in the journal Science.

This extreme mountain-forming hiatus — which resulted from a persistent thinning of Earth's continental crust — coincided with a particularly bleak eon that geologist's call the "boring billion," the researchers wrote. Just as Earth's mountains failed to grow, the simple life-forms in Earth's oceans also failed to evolve (or at least, they evolved incredibly slowly) for a billion years.

According to lead study author Ming Tang, the mountain of trouble on Earth's continents may have been partially responsible for the slow going in Earth's seas.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/earth-mountains-disappear-boring-billion.html?utm_source=notification

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1. I can see that--mountains are huge weather makers, which distributes heat around the planet

which would stimulate growth and life forms evolving. Fascinating. Thanks for posting!