Friday, August 20, 2021

The geological mysteries known as the "Great Uncomformities"

There's one in Scotland and one at the Grand Canyon. A new report offers an explanation for the one in the Grand Canyon:

Think of the red bluffs and cliffs of the Grand Canyon as Earth's history textbook, explained Barra Peak, lead author of the new study and a graduate student in geological sciences at CU Boulder. If you scale down the canyon's rock faces, you can jump back almost 2 billion years into the planet's past. But that textbook is also missing pages: In some areas, more than 1 billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared from the Grand Canyon without a trace.