A HUNT for signs of the earliest life on Earth has instead turned up the earliest evidence yet for plate tectonics. This pre-dates previous evidence by more than a billion years and will go some way to settling a debate about whether plate tectonics began early in Earth’s history, or much later.
Until now, the earliest evidence for the theory – which describes the motion of the plates that make up the Earth’s crust – came from the discovery of 2.5-billion-year-old “ophiolites”. These are a distinctive sequence of rocks from the ocean floor that end up on land and are…
