题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
江苏省沭阳县2020-2021学年高二下学期英语期中调研测试卷(含听力音频)
When Earth was just a tiny young thing,it birthed many new continents - then it swallowed them all up, leaving just a few traces behind, a new study shows.
These first continents had a special skill for living fast and dying young, but in doing so, they paved the way for solid continents that eventually led to the emergence of plate tectonics (版块运动), the new study suggests.
For hundreds of millions of years, the current continents have been more or less stable. But very little is known about the continents that existed early on in Earth's history.
To learn more about that early history, the researchers used computers to model the interactions of rock and magma (岩浆) in the Earth's crust (地壳) and below. The modeling showed that the earliest continents, known as the Hadean (4.6 to 4.0 billion years ago), were weak and likely to destruction. Modern continents have a comprehensive high tensile strength, meaning it's hard to tear them apart by stretching.
By the time the Archean (4.0 billion to 2.5 billion years ago) began ending the Hadean, the crust which had first formed was almost entirely replaced by the seeds of the modern continents.
In a sense, the researchers found, those lost Hadean continents made the later, more stable continents possible.
The emergence of continents at the close of the Hadean also contributed fertilizer that would later help seed life on Earth, the researchers wrote. Bits of them broke off and entered the atmosphere and oceans, providing necessary nutrients for the life forms that soon emerged.
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