if our skin cells are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones, how can a bad sunburn turn into cancer YEARS down the line?
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Your skin, like every tissue in your body, has cells which tend to be reside in deeper layers. They aren’t actually there to provide the functions that you usually think about regarding skin function. Instead their job is to produce those skin cells. Those cells are sometimes called progenitors or even ‘adult stem cells’. While these cells divide to give rise to cells that will become your outer skin layers, that eventually flake off, they also maintain their numbers (when one cell divides into 2, the daughter cells each have different roles in that sense).
If one of those progenitors gets damaged enough, they may produce cells that can’t regulate themselves well and usually aquire further damage to genes along the way. Mostly your body detects these but sometimes they get through
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