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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 9771770" data-attributes="member: 6796468">In geology, there's something called the Great Unconformity.Basically you have this one section of 1.7-1.3 billion year old rock with 500 million year old rock on top of it. Our current dating methods line up perfectly on the expected age of rock below that line, and above that line, indicating that about 1 billion years of geological history and sediment (give or take) is just -GONE-.And you can go see it in the Grand Canyon. You can stand right next to an orange slab of sedimentary rock that's 500 million years old sitting directly on top of 1.7 billion year old metamorphic rock, with nothing lying between them. But what's worse is you can see it EVERYWHERE ELSE, too. All across Earth's Surface, a billion years worth of missing stone and dirt.There's a lot of guesses as to -why- 1 billion years of soil and stone are missing, because remember this stuff gets compressed by the weight of the stuff on top of it, but the highest levels of that billion years of exposed material was topsoil and dirt... And the going theory is that it was during a period of -intense- glaciation where there was ice at or very near the equator.And then something happened. Some force of nature disrupted things -so drastically-, that the surface of the Earth was wiped -clean-. And when I say clean I mean clean. We're talking about thousands upon thousands of feet of soil and rock being torn off every land mass. 2-3km deep of soil and stone just -gone- down to the crystalline bare stone below that hadn't been on the surface for a billion years. This isn't just glaciers retreating and piling up the dirt 'somewhere else', either. We're talking about an erosion event so massive it dumped thousands of feet of rocks and stones into the oceans of the world.This event wiped out MOUNTAINS. The Appalachian mountains are 1.1 billion years old and used to be a lot taller than they are, now, but this event tore massive quantities of material off of them and dumped it into the sea.And if that wasn't horrifying enough to consider, it coincides with the greatest evolutionary event in the history of our world: The 540 million year old Cambrian Explosion. It's very likely that whatever the Great Unconformity is, it dumped so many nutrients into the cold, dark, oceans of the earth after tearing them down through erosion on a planetary scale, that the nutrient and mineral density was so high that it triggered an insane evolutionary diversification because there was simply so much PLENTY for everything in the ocean to feed off of that population rates of any and everything underwater exploded.Try to imagine an event that massive, and that fundamental, to the life of everything on a planet...... And it's probably entirely hidden from every person on your fantasy setting because the evidence for it is beneath their feet and their notice.I love that.</blockquote>

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