Graduate student Mike DeLucia, and advisors Willy Guenthner and Steve Marshak, have constrained the timing and magnitude of erosion that produced the Great Unconformity surface (the global erosion surface separating Precambrian and Paleozoic rocks) in the St. Francois Mountains of Missouri. These constraints come from a new method of “deep-time thermochronology” and lead to fascinating insights on uplift processes during the Rodinia supercontinent cycle, and correlations relating snowball Earth cooling to increased erosion.

Their recent paper in the journal Geology has attracted much attention, and is summarized in Eos, the weekly newsletter of the American Geophysical Union.

 The Eos article gives a summary of the research.

 Here is a link to the full journal article in Geology.