The waist of green rocks of NuVvuagittuq, Canada, can contain the oldest rocks in the world
For many years geologists have been struggling if a rock formation in Canada contains the oldest rocks in the world. Now new measurements have shown yes.
Just over four billion years ago, the magma of the Earth’s cloak has infiltrated a fracture of the Young planet’s primordial crust.
Over the next ages, almost all the rest of the planet’s primitive crust melted back to the cloak, except a small area around this fracture, which Survives to this day in Canada.
A study this Thursday at Science came to certify the theory that the last traces of the primitive terrestrial crust are accessible to the surface as part of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt – A training on the coast of Hudson Bay.
The debate on these mysterious rocks was released by the same researchers in 2008, in a study that estimated that the rocks surrounding the intrusion are about 4.3 billion years – which would make them the oldest in the world.
With this age, they would have formed during the eon hadeanoonly a few hundred millions of years after the planet itself.
However, as it recalls, the method used by researchers to date the rocks made the age of 4.3 billion controversial years. As mentioned, to the same magazine, Richard Walkerfrom the University of Maryland, most of the community that studies the early days of the land was not convinced.
But now the investigators have told the neodymium and samarium isotopes in rocks that intrude on the layer that think they are 4.3 billion years old. By definition, such intrusions are younger than the strata around them. Therefore, the dating of the intrusion would establish a minimum age for the surrounding rock.
In intrusion, unlike the older rock than surrounds it, the two clocks tell the same story: Rock is about 4.16 billion years. This supports the idea that the surrounding rock formed during the eon hadeanowhat would you do to her the only known trace of the Earth’s primitive crust.
