Explosive birth of Earth's first supercontinent

摘要

THE world's continents arrived in a blaze of fury. A pressure blowout seems to have caused vast amounts of molten rock to spew from volcanoes and harden into solid land. Until about 2.2 billion years ago. Earth was mostly under water. Small land masses existed, but not the vast continents of today. To understand how continents formed, Christopher Spencer at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues studied the global geological record.