8 beautiful places that have revealed the Earth's secrets

We measure our lives in minutes, days, years. And that works for most things. But looking at Earth's history can give us a whole new sense of time.The planet is about 4.5 billion years oldand there are places we can see rock that has existed for more than a third of that time.But just as impressive as the planet's incredible age is, so is how much it continues to change.And it turns out that you can see proof of both Earth's age and its changeability in the rockif you know where to look. Here are some of the most beautiful examples, from the most recent to the very oldest.SEE ALSO:A geologist has found part of a lost ocean that existed long before the AtlanticSEE ALSO:An asteroid that's just a fraction of a mile wide could obliterate New York CitySurtsey IslandIt doesn't look like much, but there's a reason for that. Surtsey Island, off the coast of Iceland, is a relatively new place on Earth. In fact, it's barely 50 years old. It was created between November1963 and June 1967by an erupting volcano. The combination of ash and lava meant that while the island is eroding and willsomeday disappear, it's lasted much longer than some temporary islands formed by eruptions.Since it began to be formed, it's been watched carefully by scientists who wanted to see how long it took for plants and animals to begin colonizing the new land. It took less than a decade for the first birds to nest on the island. To make sure nothing skews their results, the island has been off-limits to tourists since 1965.Finger LakesIf it looks like someone scratched across northern New York with their fingernails, that's because that's pretty much what happened, except the fingernails were gigantic and belonged to glaciers.Up until about 10,000 years ago, most of New York was actually covered by ice, which could get as thick as two miles tall. But that ice didn't just come and leaveit moved back and forth as temperatures rose and fell.Glaciers moving like this carve deep, round-bottomed gashes in the rock as they wear away at paths that have been started by streams and other forces. After the planet warmed up enough to send ice sheets north for good, 11 of these gashes eventually filled with water, becoming the Finger Lakes.The Tibetan PlateauThe Tibetan Plateau is a huge swathabout half the area of the lower 48 stateswhere rock has been pushed up by colliding continents.About 50 million years ago, the hunk of land we now call India first ran into the Asian tectonic plate. But merely having a continent in the way isn't enough to stop a subcontinent on the move. India kept jamming into Asia, raising and crumpling the land at the seam between the two plates.Geologists are still working out precisely what happened between then and now. But the result is a plateau three miles high that's home to the two tallest mountains on the planet.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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