World’s oldest ocean crust dates back to ancient supercontinent

New Scientist, 16/08/2016

The oldest patch of undisturbed oceanic crust on Earth may lie deep beneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea – and at about 340 million years old, it beats the previous record by more than 100 million years.

Earth’s outermost shell can be billions of years old on land, but most oceanic crusts are younger than 200 million years. Understanding where they developed can help us figure out what Earth looked like as continents formed, broke apart, and shifted around the globe hundreds of millions of years ago.

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