Exoplanet plate tectonics: A brand new frontier within the hunt for alien life

There’s something unusual about Earth. Just a few billion years in the past, a course of began right here that we have now by no means seen anyplace else. It fully reshaped the planet’s floor and its carbon cycle, sculpted new landscapes and has stored our house temperate and liveable for billions of years.

That course of is plate tectonics, by which Earth repeatedly subsumes and reforms the slabs of its rocky outer shell. It’s considered inextricably linked to habitability and maybe a necessary prerequisite for all times itself. With out it, our lakes and rivers might need frozen or evaporated, the oceans may have been starved of vitamins and Earth’s local weather would most likely have veered into unlivable territory way back. Life would have been in for a tough journey.

No less than, that’s the concept. However it’s powerful to know whether or not plate tectonics is admittedly essential to Earth’s verdant ecology, on condition that we have now nothing to match it with. We all know of no different planet that displays plate tectonics: among the many 4 rocky planets in our photo voltaic system, Earth is the one one to recycle its crust on this manner, and we haven’t noticed definitive indicators of it past our photo voltaic system both.

Till lately, this was kind of the place the story ended. However now, with the assistance of the James Webb Area Telescope (JWST), scientists are starting to discover the geology of rocky worlds past our photo voltaic system. Discovering one with plate tectonics will probably be an enormous ask. But when we succeed, it might be the important thing to…