Importance
Because continental crust mainly lies above sea level, its existence allowed land life to evolve from marine life. Its existence also provides broad expanses of shallow water known as epeiric seas and continental shelves where complex metazoan life could become established during early Paleozoic time. If Earth were like the other silicate planets and lacked the duality of oceanic and continental crust, our planet would be a very different place and the evolution of Homo sapiens and civilization might have been impossible.
Read more about this topic: Continental Crust
Famous quotes containing the word importance:
“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)