“Even though the dipping structure we found was identical to what we see in the Himalaya today, what we were looking at was 2 billion years old,” Wan stated.īut clues of ancient subduction in China were not all researchers found. To their surprise, they discovered the same deep geological structure that exists in the Himalayas. Using a seismological study, researchers examined the structure of ancient crust in the Ordos Plateau of Inner Mongolia, a flat region with no tall mountains. Bo Wan of IGG has found evidence of ancient subduction in China that indicates when plate tectonics spread across the planet and began forming geological features that make up our modern world. But for the first 2.5 billion years of Earth’s history, this geological activity is believed to be limited to certain parts of the globe. In the past, geologists have found evidence of continental drift, including lingering magnetism in rocks indicating changes in latitude relative to Earth’s magnetic poles.

The most stunning example of this activity is the Himalaya mountain range, which was created when the land mass now called India slammed into Eurasia billions of years ago. When two continents collide, however, the force of the land masses pushes rocks upward, forming mountains. Typically, ocean crust dips beneath continents when those plates interact, pushing the dense crust deeper into the Earth’s core. The same can now be said of plate tectonics, according to the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances.Įarth is divided into massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates that scrape past each other in a process known as continental drift. “Even though the internet existed in some form or another for decades, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Information Age began.” “It’s like the invention of the world wide web,” said co-author Dr. Billions of years before the internet was created, a natural process involving tectonic plates became a global network that transformed our world.Ī new study from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that plate tectonics involving subduction - the pushing of one continental plate beneath another when two plates converge - spread worldwide 2 billion years ago.

(CN) - Think the first world wide web is a recent development? Think again.

Drifting lands igg