I'm a freelance geologist working mostly in the Eastern Alps. I graduated in 2007 with a project studying how permafrost, that´s frozen soil, is reacting to the more visible recent changes of the alpine environment.
The world's most powerful earthquakes happen in subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath the other. When these plates become stuck together, stress builds in the crust of the Earth — like a rubber band being stretched. When enough stress builds up to overcome the friction holding the plates together — like a rubber band snapping — an earthquake occurs.
Strange rock deposits found in the Barberton Greenstone Belt preserve evidence of what could be the oldest megathrust earthquakes known so far.formed at different times over a critical 800-million-year span from 4.15 to 3.3 billion years ago, when Earth's tectonic switched from a rigid rock surface to moving plates.
A greenstone belt includes ancient rocks formed or deposited on the seafloor and later tectonically thrusted on younger continental rocks. Generally such a tectonic belt still shows an undisturbed succession from seafloor lava to marine sediments, but in a new study,, Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences New Zealand, describe an unusually chaotic rock formation from the Barberton Greenstone Belt as the result of sedimentation along an active subduction zone.
The full research paper"Large-scale submarine landslides in the Barberton Greenstone Belt, southern Africa—Evidence for subduction and great earthquakes in the Paleoarchean" was published in the journal
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