[Rockhounds] Earth's mountains disappeared for a billion years, and then life stopped evolving

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Earth, like so many of its human inhabitants, may have experienced a
mid-life crisis that culminated in baldness. But it wasn't a receding
hairline our planet had to worry about; it was a receding skyline.

For nearly a billion years during our planet's "middle age" (1.8 billion to
0.8 billion years ago), *Earth* <https://www.livescience.com/earth.html>'s
mountains literally stopped growing, while erosion wore down existing peaks
to stumps, according to a study published Feb. 11 in the journal *Science*
<https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/728>.

This extreme mountain-forming hiatus — which resulted from a persistent
thinning of Earth's continental crust — coincided with a particularly bleak
eon that geologist's call the "*boring billion*
<https://www.livescience.com/46366-continents-life-boring-billion-tectonics.html>,"
the researchers wrote. Just as Earth's mountains failed to grow, the simple
life-forms in Earth's oceans also failed to evolve (or at least, they
evolved incredibly slowly) for a billion years.

https://www.livescience.com/earth-mountains-disappear-boring-billion.html