“THE past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” So wrote L.P. Hartley, in “The Go-Between”. He was speaking of human affairs, but replace the word “country” with “planet” and you have a succinct description of Earth almost 3 billion years ago. Viewed from the present it was then, indeed, a foreign planet. Just how foreign has been shown by two geological studies published this week.
Both hail from Australia, a land rich in ancient rocks. One is the result of painstaking measurements of little balls of quartz, calcite and chlorite found in lava that erupted 2.74 billion years ago, during the Archaean aeon. The other used saws and acid to winkle tiny meteorites out of limestone a mere 20m years younger. Though the questions the teams asked of their rocks seem, at first glance, to have little in common, and neither group was aware of the other’s efforts, by a quirk of scientific synchronicity their findings complement each other, shedding an intriguing new light on the planet that Earth once was.
Sanjoy Som and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, were looking at lava to measure ancient...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1TB78eJ
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