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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Light is made of little particles called photons. They have energy. UV light that gives a sunburn has more energy than the light you can see. UV light has so much energy that when it hits your skin, it pushes the cell that it hits further into your skin. (This is why sun burn hurts.) As we know, your skin grows from the inside out and the longer the UV-impacted cell stays deep in the skin layer, the more the cell can grow and divide. But also, the pressure is higher within the skin the deeper you go.
So, what happens when you get sunburn is that a whole bunch of cells get pushed deep into the skin layer by the UV light particles. Some of them might get pushed so deep that it takes years for them to grow back out to the surface. That gives the cell plenty of time to grow. But, because the cell is now so deep in the skin, the pressure surrounding the cell prevents cell division. So the cell grows extra large: 5-100 times the size of a healthy skin cell. So when the large, now-cancerous, cell reaches the surface, it starts dividing into similarly large and malformed cells creating the cancer.
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