Zircon, The oldest piece of Earth ever found

Zircon, The oldest piece of Earth ever found.

I have been feeling that I am bit old to be doing some of the activities I still try to do. Maybe it is just the aftermath of the Christmas blues, but I have been looking forward to getting home from university and just going to sleep. However there is nothing like the discovery of a 4.375 billion year old fragment of the Earth to make you still feel young.

Like so many of the fossils and old life forms found today, this chunk of zircon was found in Western Australia. When they stumbled upon this piece of zircon, scientists knew it was old but the methods they normally use to measure how old were inadequate. They normally count the isotopes but that process does not work on zircons because the lead inside is moved around by the radioactive uranium inside. To get across this hurdle, scientists used a new method called atom-probe tomography, which basically allows them to count each lead atom. This new method allowed the scientists to determine that the piece of zircon was 4.375 billion years old.

Zircon had formed about 100 million years after the moon did. Because zircon crystals are made from water rich materials, Earth may have had water on its surface back then, or at least was able to cool down fast enough after the collision that lead to the formation of the moon. We are led to believe that the Earth was uninhabitable or a not so welcoming place to go on holiday, but this new founding now suggests that may not be entirely accurate. Still, there was no wifi back then so it is not like Earth was the most hospitable place either.