Earth’s Earliest Rocks Forged by Colliding Tectonic Plates
December 1, 20232min readOur planet’s crust has been shifting and sliding for four billion years, a new study suggestsBy Stephanie Pappas As giant slabs of Earth's crust collide in ultraslow motion, they create mountains, trigger earthquakes and forge new rocks. No one knows how or when this fundamental process, called plate tectonics, began. But an experimental study published in Nature Geoscience suggests early plate tectonics created the oldest rocks on Earth, which are about four billion years old—just short of the!-->…