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If you’ve ever found yourself flipping furniture while frantically searching for your car keys, you’ll know how easy it is to misplace something.
Maybe you’ve lost your phone, your wallet, or even the will to live. But among all these, the biggest mystery is how we lost a billion years of history. This is far more serious than finding your keys in the bread bin because there’s a colossal blank spot in our planet’s past, and nobody’s quite sure where we put it.
To put things into perspective, a billion years is almost a quarter of Earth’s existence. Yet, there’s a billion-year gap in the fossil record that geologists call “The Great Unconformity.” Let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?
How Earth’s Layers Record Time
If you ran outside right now and started to dig, you’d uncover older layers of rock the deeper you got.
You might find an Alanis Morissette tape from the 90s, a disco ball from the 70s, or even Roman coins. But why is it that human and natural remains sink deeper into the earth as time passes?
The answer lies in a process called deposition, where fine particles like sand and dust accumulate over time. In another process, cementation, these particles gradually bind together, and a few million years later, sedimentary rock…
