Confirmed: Earth's Oldest Rock In Australia

SpamSlapper writes "Australia's ABC Science reports that ancient zircon crystals discovered in Western Australia have been positively dated to 4.374 billion years, confirming their place as the oldest rock ever found on Earth, according to a new study. The research reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, means Earth began forming a crust far sooner than previously thought, following the giant impact event which created the Earth-Moon system 4.5 billion years ago."

It comes from a land down under..

[jamesjw]

Where this rock is about as old as the social and development views of our current Prime Minister..

Re:

[TapeCutter]

It's a shinny rock! We dug it up! - Surprised Tony isn't trying to sell it to someone.

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[GloomE]

Why would he? He knows it can't be more than 10,000 years old. These "scientists" don't know what they're talking about.

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[GloomE]

Your mathematicians also don't know what they are talking about.

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[GloomE]

There's at least the bit where you set pi = 3.

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[Jason Levine]

Bah! It can't be older than last Tuesday - when the world was created. Any memories you have of the time prior to last Tuesday were merely planted there as a test of your faith.

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[thePowersGang]

I would like to defend this rock and state that it is nowhere near as old as our PM's views. (posting to undo bad moderation)

Re:It comes from a land down under..

[mjwx]

Where this rock is about as old as the social and development views of our current Prime Minister..

However unlike Tony Abbott, the rock is worth something to Australia.

Imma hit you so hard

[Bite The Pillow]

Imma hit you so hard, you gonna get a crust.

And, I'm gonna kick your ass into ORBIT around you, SON!

Now what?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's what happens when you leave science reporting to journalism majors. Reading the abstract to the original Nature Geoscience article is more enlightening.

One of the reasons people get so worked up about this mineral grain is because the oxygen isotope data says it formed when earth had oceans. If it's the age they think it is, it puts the development of oceans much earlier than they previously had evidence for. That would then support the impact hypothesis.

Ken Ham issues statement

[Brad1138]

"there's this book..."

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[cascadingstylesheet]

"there's this book..."

You don't have to be a creationist to have doubts about this kind of dating.

It's pretty much the poster child of something that can't be confirmed by experiment.

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[Improv]

How do you think these dating methods came to be devised and then trusted by the scientific community?

Re:Ken Ham issues statement

[Mashdar]

I think gp's problem is with this specific type (U-Pb) of dating.
I don't understand how initial values are determined. (Is there some method by which the original ratio of the two elements is known? Or the proportion of radioactive isotopes?)

But, from the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]

Uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating is one of the oldest[1] and most refined of the radiometric dating schemes, with a routine age range of about 1 million years to over 4.5 billion years, and with routine precisions in the 0.1-1 percent range.[2]

so it does not sound at all un-tested.

While GP is correct that we cannot experimentally confirm the specific mechanisms here (radioactive Pb decay over one million+ years...) , we have a very good description of radioactive decay across the board (table?) and observational results sound extremely consistent. Direct experimentation is not the only form of scientific evidence, despite what [creationist intelligent_designist whatever_nut] might say.

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[Mashdar]

Which reminds me -- My partner's brother was reemed by a clueless judge/history teacher at his middle school science fair for not having a control group in his observational study of moss growth across local tree species.... Observational study is awesome, especially when all you care about is correlation between a known and an unknown, rather than causailty. The US school system likes the word "experiment" too much for its own good.

Lots of Iron around there

[Harlequin80]

The area these are found are extremely high in Iron content. There are a number of high grade iron ore mines nearby. I wonder if there is any link between the high iron content and the formation of these rocks.

Re:Lots of Iron around there

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. The 'Oldest Rock' they're talking about are actually individual mineral grains in a metamorphic rock that used to be sandstone. The zircon sand grains predate the rock they're in by about a billion years. The iron deposts you're talking about come from the same perioid of geologic time as the sandstone.

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[rve]

The iron formations are about 2 billion years younger.

The banded iron formations were formed by the earliest photosynthetic life, between 2.5 and 1 billion years ago. Oxygen produced by these single celled organisms formed iron oxide with dissolved iron ions in the oceans and precipitate on the ocean floor. This started when significant amounts of oxygen started dissolving in the water, and ended when most of the iron was used up. When that happened, the oxygen levels of the water suddenly increased, killin [wikipedia.org]

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[Harlequin80]

That is fascinating - I had no idea the deposits were due to organics. I thought it was to do with some of the iron core solidifying on the surface after the impact.

Obviously

[El_Muerte_TDS]

The old stuff is always at the bottom of a pile.

Re:Obviously

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Yes but, Australia being upside down, the bottom is at ground level.

Priority queue

[Dareth]

It is a priority queue. Vegemite comes to the top first, then old rocks after.

Upside Down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming "North" is "Up" is just a variation on the flat-earth mentality... :-)

Unfortunately

[Greyfox]

They had to kill the rock to confirm its age.

Re:Amazing!

[dbraden]

I did not know that scientists had examined and dated every rock on (and every rock within) the Earth! The most spectacular part of this task was back when they dismantled Mt Everest, pebble by pebble, examining and dating every little rock, before re-constructing the mountain from all those sorted rocks.

I agree with your general sentiment regarding fake science, however, a little bit of reading comprehension will go a long way.

oldest rock ever found on Earth

It's not like the summary says "The oldest rock on earth!".

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[Farmer Tim]

The ABC is probably more at fault, they're supposed to have a dedicated science unit so it gets that kind of thing right.

Of course, one could take the view that it's obvious that not every single rock on Earth has been dated, therefore the only people who really need the word "known" in the headline are pedants or the immensely thick.

wtf? Do you even understand the subject?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Mount Everest is fairly young, we know this because unlike you scientists are aware of how Mount Everest was formed.

You are just a flat earther in denial. Read up on geology.

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[rve]

And you don't have all the answers either

The 'rock' in question is a microscopic zircon crystal, not an actual chunk of rock. Think of it as a very hard grain of sand, that has been weathered off the rock in which it formed, deposited somewhere as sediment, which turned into sedimentary rock, and so on, perhaps a great many times, before it settled in the rock in which it was found.

The Himalayas started uplifting some 50 million years ago, but that doesn't mean the material in it can be no more than 50 mill

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[Razalhague]

Whenever you see a science headline that says something retarded, you should assume bad science journalism, rather than bad science.

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[Calavar]

Fine, it's the oldest known rock, you pedant. It's still plenty interesting because the oldest known rocks up until know were only about 3.8 billion years old. There is the potential to learn a great deal about the early days of the earth from this rock. Oh, and obligatory xkcd: 1194 [xkcd.com]

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[donaldm]

It's an older rock, and they are saving it so they cab reveal it next year

Now if you had moved your finger about 3 mm to your right of the letter b the sentence would make more sense. :)

Re: I wonder what was underneath the rock they fo

[KJSwartz]

Don't you mean cm to the right?
Egads! Americans using the metric system is like teaching dolphins to ride a bike. It's cute to watch them try!

Re:

[Brad1138]

I was thinking the same thing, I think about 1 cm sounds closer.

Did they finally date them?

[dutchwhizzman]

I'm sure AC/DC will be delighted with their new title of oldest rock on the planet.

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[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

I'm sure AC/DC will be delighted with their new title of oldest rock on the planet.

Well, I handle my rock with zircon encrusted tweezers.
(Just had to get that off my chest.)

Methodology

[Marquis231]

I figure they cut the crystals open and counted the rings, all 4.374 billion of them.

Rolling stones

[bloodhawk]

obviously these scientists haven't carbon dated Mick Jagger yet!

Creationism busted again

[Murdoch5]

There is no way a rock can be older then 6000 years, it's impossible, of course so is logical and creationism.

Franklin institue

[rjejr]

Had my hand on a rock yesterday at the Franklin insitue in Philly that said it was 5.5 billion years old that was "found on Earth". (Well the rock didn't speak, thats what the sign read.) I know a meteor isnt created on Earth, but it was found there.