"Unfortunately, we haven't found many very old rocks on Earth because our planet's surface is constantly renewed by plate tectonics, coupled with erosion"
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There is a quiet rebuke tucked into this seemingly neutral bit of geology: Earth is not a museum. Duncan’s “unfortunately” gives the game away. The line isn’t just reporting a fact about plate tectonics and erosion; it’s mourning a lost archive. The oldest rocks aren’t missing because we haven’t looked hard enough, but because the planet itself is an active editor, revising its surface, shredding drafts, recycling evidence back into the mantle.
That framing matters because it flips the usual human expectation of permanence. We want origins to sit still long enough to be cataloged and admired. Instead, Duncan reminds us that deep time is adversarial to tidy narratives. Plate tectonics doesn’t merely move continents around; it destroys the very materials that would let us read the earliest chapters of Earth’s story in situ. Erosion finishes the job, sanding down whatever tectonics doesn’t subduct.
The subtext is methodological humility: the reason we know less about the planet’s earliest history isn’t ignorance so much as physics. Earth’s surface is biased toward the recent, which forces scientists to become detectives rather than librarians, triangulating ancient conditions from scraps: zircons, isotopic signatures, battered cratons. There’s also a subtle contrast with worlds like the Moon or Mars, where old surfaces linger because the recycling machinery is weaker. On Earth, the same processes that erase primordial rocks also make the planet habitable. The loss is real, but it comes with a livable, dynamic world as the tradeoff.
That framing matters because it flips the usual human expectation of permanence. We want origins to sit still long enough to be cataloged and admired. Instead, Duncan reminds us that deep time is adversarial to tidy narratives. Plate tectonics doesn’t merely move continents around; it destroys the very materials that would let us read the earliest chapters of Earth’s story in situ. Erosion finishes the job, sanding down whatever tectonics doesn’t subduct.
The subtext is methodological humility: the reason we know less about the planet’s earliest history isn’t ignorance so much as physics. Earth’s surface is biased toward the recent, which forces scientists to become detectives rather than librarians, triangulating ancient conditions from scraps: zircons, isotopic signatures, battered cratons. There’s also a subtle contrast with worlds like the Moon or Mars, where old surfaces linger because the recycling machinery is weaker. On Earth, the same processes that erase primordial rocks also make the planet habitable. The loss is real, but it comes with a livable, dynamic world as the tradeoff.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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