WollongongEarth deleted more than a billion years of its rocks.
Sandstone from 538 million years ago often sits directly on rock 1.2 to 1.8 billion years old.
Modellers at Australia’s University of Wollongong say supercontinent breakup pushed landmasses upward through mantle motion, and erosion sanded them down.
Rival explanations, Snowball Earth glaciers among them, remain untested against global datasets, the authors say.
Researchers still debate the cause, though all agree the same forces set the stage for complex life.
How each outlet framed it
- 404 Media
- frames the Great Unconformity as a deep-Earth erasure, citing a 1.2–1.8 billion year gap in the strata record
Sources: 404 Media