Continents grow in earnest
Crust production accelerates, and the continents begin approaching their modern volume.
- When
- Known to
- ± 200 million years
- Era
- Mesoarchean, Archean
Zircon records show a sustained rise in continental crust through the late Mesoarchean and Neoarchean, with a major pulse between 2.8 and 2.6 billion years ago. Estimates of how much crust existed by the end of the Archean range from a third to nearly all of today's volume — the disagreement is one of the larger open problems in geology. More continent means more shallow sea, more weathering and more nutrients delivered to the ocean.