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Tectonics

Changing of the plates

Nature Geoscience volume 9, pages 731–732 (2016)Cite this article

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The composition of Earth's crust depends on the style of plate tectonics and of the melting regimes in the mantle. Analyses of the oldest identified rocks suggest that these styles and the resulting crust have changed over Earth's history.

When deciphering the clues contained within ancient rocks, geologists apply the principle of uniformitarianism: the present is the key to the past. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Reimink et al.1 show that this principle may not apply when it comes to making Earth's crust. Geochemical and isotopic analyses of what are possibly the planet's oldest known rocks — the Acasta Gneiss Complex in the Northwest Territories of Canada — reveal that these small remnants of early crust do not contain any trace of continental crust-like material, implying that the style of tectonics must have changed over time to create the continents that exist on Earth today.

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Figure 1: The Acasta Gneiss Complex in the Northwestern Territories, Canada.

References

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  1. Alan Brandon is in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Houston, Texas 77204, USA,

    Alan Brandon

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  1. Alan Brandon
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Correspondence to Alan Brandon.

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Brandon, A. Changing of the plates. Nature Geosci 9, 731–732 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2800

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