A Record of Continental Erosion (IMAGE)
Caption
A chronological record of the transition between the formation and growth of continents through mountain-building processes (left) and the extreme stability and slow erosion that characterizes Earth’s oldest surviving terranes (right) provides a new understanding into the physical properties of the continents and forces operating to exhume them over geologic time. This erosional history and the link between these two images is made by reconstructing the thermal history of the lithosphere using U-Pb thermochronology, a temperature-sensitive geochronologic system, on lower crustal minerals such as rutile (inset). This image relates to a paper that appeared in the Jan. 06, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by T.J. Blackburn at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and colleagues, was titled, “An Exhumation History of Continents over Billion-Year Time Scales.”
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