March 29, 2024

AndronETalksNews

AndronETalksNews

Explaining a billion-year gap in the fossil record

Big Think

By Robby Berman – August 28, 2021

It is called the “Great Unconformity,” and it has puzzled geologists ever since it was first noticed in the walls of the Grand Canyon by famed geologist John Wesley Powell in 1869. In geology, time is marked by layers of rock deposited atop each other, little by little over time. The thing about the Great Unconformity is that about a billion years of rock appear to be missing between 3 billion-year-old sediment and relatively young, 550-million-year-old stuff sitting directly on top of it.

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