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Role of major erosion events in Earth’s dynamics

A study provides evidence for the unconventional idea that the advent and evolution of plate tectonics on Earth were related to the rise of continents and to sediment accumulation at continental edges and in trenches.
  1. Whitney Behr

    1. Whitney Behr is at the Geological Institute, Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.

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Earth is the only planet in the Solar System that shows a form of planetary evolution known as plate tectonics. In this mode of planetary cooling, a convecting mantle conducts heat through a relatively rigid outer shell called the lithosphere. This shell is produced at spreading centres (boundaries between two separating plates), and is recycled back into the mantle at subduction zones (regions in which one plate is being forced underneath another). Why planetary cooling on Earth operates in this mode, and when the current period of plate tectonics began, remain subject to debate1–3. Writing in Nature, Sobolev and Brown4 propose answers to these questions that could have fundamental implications for understanding the connections between internal dynamics and surface processes — including climatic and atmospheric processes — on Earth and other planets.

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Nature 570, 38-39 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01711-8

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