Mark Garlick/Science Picture Library/Alamy
There’s something unusual about Earth. Just a few billion years in the past, a course of began right here that we’ve got by no means seen wherever else. It utterly reshaped the planet’s floor and its carbon cycle, sculpted new landscapes and has stored our dwelling temperate and liveable for billions of years.
That course of is plate tectonics, through which Earth constantly subsumes and reforms the slabs of its rocky outer shell. It’s regarded as inextricably linked to habitability and maybe an important prerequisite for all times itself. With out it, our lakes and rivers might need frozen or evaporated, the oceans may have been starved of vitamins and Earth’s local weather would in all probability have veered into unlivable territory way back. Life would have been in for a tough experience.
At the least, that’s the thought. However it’s robust to know whether or not plate tectonics is admittedly essential to Earth’s verdant ecology, on condition that we’ve got nothing to match it with. We all know of no different planet that reveals plate tectonics: among the many 4 rocky planets in our photo voltaic system, Earth is the one one to recycle its crust on this approach, and we haven’t noticed definitive indicators of it past our photo voltaic system both.
Till lately, this was kind of the place the story ended. However now, with the assistance of the James Webb House Telescope (JWST), scientists are starting to discover the geology of rocky worlds past our photo voltaic system. Discovering one with plate tectonics might be an enormous ask. But when we succeed, it might be the important thing to…
