Earth spent 500 million years creating and eating dead continents

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For more than a billion years, Earth covered itself in new continents. New research shows that those continents were quickly swallowed up again but their deaths fertilized life on the surface.

Earth spent 500 million years creating and eating dead continents : Read more

 

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The article says "When Earth was just a wee young thing, it birthed many new continents — then it swallowed them all up, leaving just a few traces behind, a new study shows. These first continents had a knack for living fast and dying young, but in doing so, they paved the way for solid continents that eventually led to the emergence of plate tectonics, the new study suggests. "Our results explain that continents remained weak and prone to destruction in their infancy, ~4.5 to ~4.0 billion years ago, and then progressively differentiated and became rigid over the next billion years to form the core of our modern continents," lead author Fabio Capitanio, a Monash University Earth scientist, said in a statement."

This is interesting because the modeling overlaps with the giant impact model for the origin of our Moon.

"...The team thus places the age of the Moon between 4.40 billion and 4.45 billion years, up to 110 million years younger than the commonly accepted age of 4.51 billion years. The finding opens the door to re-dating many lunar samples and, ultimately, the Moon-forming impact.", THE MOON MIGHT BE YOUNGER THAN WE THOUGHT, News Notes, Sky & Telescope 140(5):11, 2020 (November issue).

Supercomputer simulations could unlock mystery of Moon's formation, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201204110254.htm, 'The effect of pre-impact spin on the Moon-forming collision', https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/500/3/2861/6007797, "ABSTRACT We simulate the hypothesized collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized impactor that created the Moon."
On page 4, Table 1 is provided showing a proto-earth with 3 hour day or so. The effects of a spinning Theia are presented and on page 5, here are some stats provided, "We consider an impact between a target proto-Earth of mass 0.887 M⊕ and an impactor, Theia, of mass 0.133 M⊕."

Early proto-earth and formation continues after the giant impact so the modeling of the continents in the period 4.5 to 4.0 billion years ago, likely gets very interesting