The oldest thing ever discovered on Earth

April 29th, 2014

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

4 bilion year old gem stone found in Australia's Jack Hills region

The oldest material on Earth which has yet been dated by man is a zircon
mineral of 4.4 billion years old from a sedimentary gneiss in the Jack
Hills of the Narre Gneiss Terrane of Australia. October 12, 2004.
Satellite image. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty
Images)

Reuters

To put it mildly, this is one gem of a gem.

Scientists
using two different age-determining techniques have shown that a tiny
zircon crystal found on a sheep ranch in western Australia is the oldest
known piece of our planet, dating to 4.4 billion years ago.

Writing
in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday, the researchers said the
discovery indicates that Earth’s crust formed relatively soon after the
planet formed and that the little gem was a remnant of it.

John
Valley, a University of Wisconsin geoscience professor who led the
research, said the findings suggest that the early Earth was not as
harsh a place as many scientists have thought.

To
determine the age of the zircon fragment, the scientists first used a
widely accepted dating technique based on determining the radioactive
decay of uranium to lead in a mineral sample.

But
because some scientists hypothesized that this technique might give a
false date due to possible movement of lead atoms within the crystal
over time, the researchers turned to a second sophisticated method to
verify the finding.

They
used a technique known as atom-probe tomography that was able to
identify individual atoms of lead in the crystal and determine their
mass, and confirmed that the zircon was indeed 4.4 billion years old.

To
put that age in perspective, the Earth itself formed 4.5 billion years
ago as a ball of molten rock, meaning that its crust formed relatively
soon thereafter, 100 million years later. The age of the crystal also
means that the crust appeared just 160 million years after the very
formation of the solar system.

The
finding supports the notion of a “cool early Earth” where temperatures
were low enough to sustain oceans, and perhaps life, earlier than
previously thought, Valley said.

This
period of Earth history is known as the Hadean eon, named for ancient
Greek god of the underworld Hades because of hellish conditions
including meteorite bombardment and an initially molten surface.

“One
of the things that we’re really interested in is: when did the Earth
first become habitable for life? When did it cool off enough that life
might have emerged?” Valley said in a telephone interview.

The
discovery that the zircon crystal, and thereby the formation of the
crust, dates from 4.4 billion years ago suggests that the planet was
perhaps capable of sustaining microbial life 4.3 billion years ago,
Valley said.

“We
have no evidence that life existed then. We have no evidence that it
didn’t. But there is no reason why life could not have existed on Earth
4.3 billion years ago,” he added.

The oldest fossil records of life are stromatolites produced by an archaic form of bacteria from about 3.4 billion years ago.

The
zircon was extracted in 2001 from a rock outcrop in Australia’s Jack
Hills region. For a rock of such importance, it is rather small. It
measures only about 200 by 400 microns, about twice the diameter of a
human hair.

“Zircons
can be large and very pretty. But the ones we work on are small and not
especially attractive except to a geologist,” Valley said. “If you held
it in the palm of your hand, if you have good eyesight you could see it
without a magnifying glass.”

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)

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