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Continental drift is the hypothesis, originating in the early 20th century, that Earth's continents move or drift relative to each other over geologic time. [1] The hypothesis of continental drift has since been validated and incorporated into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere.
The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers ( stratigraphy ). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left ...
Earth formed in this manner about 4.54 billion years ago (with an uncertainty of 1%) [25] [26] [4] and was largely completed within 10–20 million years. [27] In June 2023, scientists reported evidence that the planet Earth may have formed in just three million years, much faster than the 10−100 million years thought earlier.
Midcontinent Rift System. The Midcontinent Rift System (MRS) or Keweenawan Rift is a 2,000 km (1,200 mi) long geological rift in the center of the North American continent and south-central part of the North American plate. It formed when the continent's core, the North American craton, began to split apart during the Mesoproterozoic era of the ...
It is the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the modern Cenozoic Era. The name Eocene comes from the Ancient Greek Ἠώς ( Ēṓs, "Dawn") and καινός ( kainós, "new") and refers to the "dawn" of modern ('new') fauna that appeared during the epoch. [ 7][ 8] The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Paleocene Epoch to the ...
For purposes of this list, a minor plate is any plate with an area less than 20 million km 2 (7.7 million sq mi) but greater than 1 million km 2 (0.39 million sq mi). Amurian Plate – A minor tectonic plate in eastern Asia Pages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Early Earth is loosely defined as encompassing Earth in its first one billion years, or gigayear (Ga, 10 9 y), [ 1] from its initial formation in the young Solar System at about 4.55 Ga to some time in the Archean eon in approximately 3.5 Ga. [ 2] On the geologic time scale, this comprises all of the Hadean eon, starting with the formation of ...
Plate tectonics (from Latin tectonicus, from Ancient Greek τεκτονικός (tektonikós) 'pertaining to building') is the scientific theory that Earth 's lithosphere comprises a number of large tectonic plates, which have been slowly moving since 3–4 billion years ago. The model builds on the concept of continental drift, an idea ...