Our planet is alive today. The climate shifts from greenhouse to coldhouse and back again. While earthquakes, volcanoes and trenches are signs of its unstable surface, the ocean trenches, mountains ranges and volcanoes are all indicators of it's active surface. If you look back enough, you will find a time when Earth was very boring. The Boring Billion is a period that occurred between 1850m to 850m years ago. It appears to have seen very little plate tectonic activity, very little climate change, and a slowing of biological evolutionary evolution. This period was more fascinating than we thought.
From the Boring Billion, geologists have been studying the composition and geochemistry of continental rocks. Geochemistry indicates that the continental crust was too thin and hot (40 km or less), to support plate tectonics, or to build mountain ranges. Curiously, however, the structure and compositions of continental rocks suggest that crust did move and that there were low mountain ranges. Geophysical Research Letters published the findings.
The Boring Billion is not the dodgem-car plate tectonics that we see today. It seems more like a dance on a slippery floor. Although this gentle form of platetectonics is long gone, understanding it might give us some insight into how modern plate tectonics began.
