[skytwosea]

I disagree. This abstract is a mouthful, no doubt, but it's a highly information-dense mouthful, and it does its job well.

Along the spectrum between intra-disciplinary academic communication on one end and public-sphere science communication on the other, the abstract is and should be just above the level of the paper it's abstracting. It's meant to be a technical summary for academics, and should not be dialed down for the sake of non-technical consumption. This one - speaking as a geologist with a long academic history - reads quite well, I think.

In contrast, the sentence you propose should be the output of responsible and effective scientific communicators working closer to the public-sphere end of the spectrum, say, at the level of phys.org, here on hackernews, etc.