It has been found by a Virginia Tech team of geologists that how continents were created on Earth over 2.5 billion years ago. The team traced that how the continents continued till 70 million years ago and impacted life, climate and landscape on Earth.

The study has been published in Nature Geoscience. It looked into geologic events like volcanic activity 10 million years ago in Panama and Costa Rica of today. It concentrated on the events to reveal the reasons behind continent-building.

According to Esteban Gazel, an assistant professor of geology with Virginia Tech’s College of Science, the complete planet would have become an ocean in absence of continental crust. According to him, the continental masses or areas of thick silicic crust are a unique characteristic of Earth.

Nearly 2.5 billion years ago, the continental mass of Earth formed in the Archaean Eon. At that time, the Earth was three times hotter with high volcanic activity. This made Earth unfit for survival of any organism.

Earlier, scientists assumed that the planet’s continental crust was formed during this time in Earth’s history. But for the first time, the new research shows that a ‘juvenile’ continental crust has been formed during Earth’s history.

According to Gazel, “We were able to use the formation of the Central America land bridge as a natural laboratory to understand how continents formed, and we discovered while the massive production of continental crust that took place during the Archaean is no longer the norm”. He added that there are exceptions that create ‘juvenile’ continental crust.

Costa Rica and Panama were used by researchers, which were formed when two oceanic plates hit and led to melting of iron- and magnesium-rich oceanic crust over the past 70 million years.