A Billion-Year Gap Rewritten: Continental Crust in Flux
New evidence shows the Great Unconformity wasn’t caused by a single global ice age; instead, massive erosion and crustal exhumation occurred during the assembly of ancient supercontinents, particularly Columbia between 2.1 and 1.6 billion years ago, with regional timing varying and suggesting multiple unconformities rather than a global wipeout, reshaping ideas about Earth’s history and the drivers of the Cambrian explosion.
