Mantle-driven uplift and glacial erosion may explain the Great Unconformity

A recent Nature study by Nicolas Flament and Santosh Dhungana proposes that slow mantle currents lifted continents over hundreds of millions of years, exposing them to glacial erosion before they sank and were covered by new sediments. The Great Unconformity marks a gap of roughly 200 million to more than a billion years in the geologic record, and its oldest North American overlying sediments date to 635–482 million years ago.

If the model is supported, geologists may need to account for deep mantle motion when interpreting this missing interval, not just surface erosion. The explanation is based on models, however, and the article does not report how well they distinguish mantle-driven uplift from other causes of the unconformity.