"Unveiling Earth's Ancient Appearance: The Impact of Absent Plate Tectonics"

The Earth's lithosphere, consisting of rigid plates that float on the convecting mantle below, has undergone continual movement and reshaping due to plate tectonics over hundreds of millions of years. However, recent research suggests that the vigorous plate tectonics we see today may be a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back only a billion years or less. Without this modern version of plate tectonics, the formation of large mountain ranges like the Himalayas would not have been possible, resulting in a flatter Earth for the first three billion years of its existence.