Study finds tectonic plates are older than believed

Geophysicists at Yale University have found that the earth's tectonic plates are more than 4 billion years old, YaleNews reported.

The age of tectonic plates is at least a billion years older than previously believed. Jun Korenaga, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior author of the new study, and Meng Guo, a Yale graduate student, placed the plates at 4.4 billion years old in a study, according to Yale News. 

“Understanding when plate tectonics started on Earth has long been a fundamentally difficult problem,” Korenaga told YaleNews. “As we go back deeper in time, we have fewer geological records.”

Korenaga and Guo used a geochemical simulation of Earth based on argon in their study, which was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, according to YaleNews. 

“Because of the peculiar characteristics of argon, we can deduce what has happened to the solid Earth by studying this atmospheric argon,” Korenaga told YaleNews. “This makes it an excellent bookkeeper of ancient events.”