Scientists studying rocks in South Africa report evidence for the earliest known earthquake triggered by plate tectonics. The temblor struck more than 3 billion years ago.
The rocks preserve telltale signs of ancient submarine landslides that tend to occur in response to giant earthquakes set off by some collisions of slabs of the planet’s crust, geologists Cornel de Ronde and Simon Lamb report February 27 in Geology.
Finding evidence of such a giant earthquake so early in Earth’s roughly 4.5-billion-year history throws a spotlight on a hotly debated topic in geology: When did plate tectonics, the constant movements of interlocking pieces of crust, arise (SN: 1/13/21)?
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