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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Sun damage works because radiation from the sun actually damages the processes in which cells replicate.
Sunburn damages the top layers to where the cells are destroyed completely. But it also causes much more fundamental damage to the cells below the flaky skin, altering them.
Consider a cell, it has RNA which copies DNA allowing it to split into new cells. RNA is extremely precise. It gets the process right 99.999…% of the time, and maybe there is a mutation in there, but often times it’s inconsequential and only adds up over millennia.
RNA works because it itself has an extremely rigid set of instructions on how it does its job. However, if a highly charged particle from the sun comes down, and directly hits a part of it that had key information, damaging it, but not killing it, the RNA cell will just plough on through and continue working as if nothing has changed. Only now it’s producing malformed outputs, which will themselves eventually produce malformed outputs as they inherit the now corrupt information given to them by their parent.
Of course, this works on statistics. Given enough time in the sun, eventually the chance you’ll damage RNA and get something like cancer reaches 100%. Of course, some people are luckier than others when it comes to getting cancer in their lifetimes.
So, when you’re burned by the sun, the burned cells die and flake off, but the cells underneath could now be irrevocably altered. Constantly producing bad new skin cells that manifest themselves as a cancer. Cutting out the damaged skin cells, or otherwise destroying them is the only way to stop it replicating further.
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