A piece of Earth 3.8 billion years old found.

Bare
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A piece of Earth 3.8 billion years old found.

Whats up everybody, rrsok here.

Found some pretty interesting news in yahoo about scientist finding a chunk of Earth 3.8 billion years old. Incase you havn't stumbled apon it yet, here it is.

 

 

LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com
Fri Mar 23, 4:47 PM ET

Only in science could the discovery of something old and crusty be exciting.

And researchers are very excited about finding chunks of Earth's outer crust that are 3.8 billion years old. Most stuff that old has been folded back into the planet and lost forever or spat back out after being melted into unrecognizable magma.

The discovery, detailed in today's issue of the journal Science, provides solid evidence that Earth had crustal plates way back then that were banging into each other much as they do today in a process that drives earthquakes and reshapes continents. That activity, and the chemical changes to land, sea and air that accompany it, are thought to have been crucial to the instigation of life on Earth, an event that remains utterly mysterious in terms of timing and method.

New thinking

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. For a long time, geologists thought all this activity, called plate tectonics, did not start until about 2.5 billion years ago. They speculated that for a long time after its formation, the planet might have been a fiery hell or a total waterworld. More recently, however, geochemical analysis of rocks had suggested there were continents and plate tectonics 4.3 billion years ago—very soon after the planet's birth.

The new study is the first to provide physical evidence of tectonics among Earth's oldest known rock structures, said study team member Hubert Staudigel of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

“The fact that this rock structure is so well preserved is particularly lucky,” Staudigel said. “The materials were formed as seafloor along a spreading center and accreted to a continental plate and just stuck there, surviving almost unscathed for as long as 3.8 billion years.”

The crusty old stuff was found in a rare outcrop of rock near the southwestern coast of Greenland.

How it happened

The Isua deposits, as they are called, have been studied since the 1960s. They also contain fossilized evidence of the earliest bacterial life on Earth, also from about 3.8 billion years ago.

The rocks have two components. Some was lava that was once below the seafloor and rose to the surface as crustal plates spread apart long ago. Embedded in that lava rock are sheets of basalt rock that got mixed in after the lava formed, the new study reveals. Even though the rocks have physically changed over time, the scientists were able to discern their original characteristics from fine-grained crystals that were cooled by contact with surrounding colder rocks.

“Our work shows that some form of seafloor spreading and oceanic crust formation occurs as far back in history as geological records go,” said Staudigel 's colleague Maarten de Wit of University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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Mordagar
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Nonsense. The Earth is only

Nonsense. The Earth is only 6,000 years old, maximum. Anyone with a brain knows that.


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Mordagar wrote: Nonsense.

Mordagar wrote:
Nonsense. The Earth is only 6,000 years old, maximum. Anyone with a brain knows that.

 

 

 

Of course Mordagar! God put it there just to test us Praise be to the LAWD! 


qbg
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The article may SEEM to

The article may SEEM to contradict the FACT that the earth is only 6000 years old, but by INTERPRETING the article, it is clear that it is a joke because 3.8 billion is way larger than 6000....

"What right have you to condemn a murderer if you assume him necessary to "God's plan"? What logic can command the return of stolen property, or the branding of a thief, if the Almighty decreed it?"
-- The Economic Tendency of Freethought


gobaskof
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qbg wrote: The article may

qbg wrote:
The article may SEEM to contradict the FACT that the earth is only 6000 years old, but by INTERPRETING the article, it is clear that it is a joke because 3.8 billion is way larger than 6000....


The 3.8 billion isn't meant to be taken literaly! Its a metaphor for really old! You see this doesn't contradict any facts unless you take it at face value like the fundamentalists do! So i can comfortably belive in science without it contradicting facts like the yound world and biblical flood!Tongue out

Quote:
I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore. - Charles Darwin


BGH
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gobaskof wrote: The 3.8

gobaskof wrote:
The 3.8 billion isn't meant to be taken literaly! Its a metaphor for really old! You see this doesn't contradict any facts unless you take it at face value like the fundamentalists do! So i can comfortably belive in science without it contradicting facts like the yound world and biblical flood!Tongue out

Well unless you truly have faith in science can you truly understand the Word of science. It is literal and True!

(seriosusly this thread has devolved into sarcastic analogies towards theism - it is pretty damn funny and I am having a good laugh)