Summary:
- Researchers discovered a 2-billion-year-old "fossil" of a hydrothermal vent system in the Bushveld Igneous Complex in South Africa, providing rare geological evidence of ancient deep-sea processes.
- This discovery challenges the long-standing theory that the Earth’s crust was too rigid to support hydrothermal circulation during the Paleoproterozoic era, suggesting that plate tectonic-like processes may have been active much earlier than previously assumed.