Thursday, 6 March 2014

The oldest bit of the Earth

Many of you will have heard me discuss in class that when I was a student (which isn't that long ago!) I learnt that the oldest rock in the crust was 3,800 Ma from Greenland; this had changed to 4.200 Ma from dating a rock in northern Canada.  We now have to revise that number again as a Zircon crystal from Western Australia has been dated (by the Uranium-Lead method) to be 4,400 Ma.  We still have meteorites that are older, but we are finding fragments of the earliest crust which may give us an indication of the processes that formed our planet.

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