All Articles

Earth may have been a “water world” with submerged continents 3.2 billion years ago

Author: awood

Benjamin Johnson of Iowa State University woks at an outcrop in remote Western Australia where geologists are studying 3.2-billion-year-old ocean crust.

Dr. Ben Johnson, assistant professor in the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences, and coauthor Dr. Boswell Wing, University of Colorado Boulder, studied 3.2-billion-year-old ocean crust exposed in Australia and used that data to build a quantitative, inverse model of ancient seawater. The model indicates the early Earth could have been a “water world” with submerged continents. The findings have just been published online by the journal Nature Geoscience.

Find out more by navigating to the ISU News Service.