A fist-size sample of the Acasta Gneisses, rocks in northwest Canada that are the oldest
known rocks on Earth. Credit: Mike Beauregard/Creative Commons.
Not as old as ‘nasty p-lousy”
The Acasta Gneiss is a tonalite gneiss in the Slave craton in Northwest Territories, Canada.
The rock body is exposed on an island about 300 kilometres north of Yellowknife.
The rock of the outcrop was metamorphosed 3.58 to 4.031 billion years ago and is the oldest known intact crustal fragment on Earth.[1]
First described in 1989, it was named for the nearby Acasta River east of Great Bear Lake.
The Acasta outcrop is found in a remote area of the [...] people land settlement.
It is the oldest known exposed rock in the world.
Contents:
1 Formation
2 Contention for record
3 Exhibit
4 See also
5 References
6 Bibliography
Formation
The metamorphic rock exposed in the outcrop was previously a granitoid that formed 4.2 billion years ago, an age based on radiometric dating of zircon crystals at 4.2 Ga.[2]
The Acasta Gneiss is important in establishing the early history of the continental crust.
Acasta Gneiss was formed in the Basin Groups unofficial period of the Hadean eon, which came before the Archean: see Timetable of the Precambrian.
Contention for record
In 2008 an age of 4.28 billion years was reported for an outcrop in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay, 40 kilometres south of Inukjuak, Quebec, Canada.[3]
However, the dating method used did not involve similar radiometric dating of zircon crystals and it remains somewhat contentious whether the reported date represents the age that the rock itself formed or a residual isotopic signature of older material that melted to form the rock.[4]
Mafic rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt have recorded isotopic compositions that can only be produced in the Hadean (i.e. older than 4 billion years ago) and the complete isotopic study of all the lithologies included in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt suggests that it was formed nearly 4.4 billion years ago.[5]
“Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE)
Scientists associated with the Institute for Creation Research
have finished a five-year research project known as RATE,
or Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth.”
“How old are your rocks?”
Same age as me.
There's only one thing that could have prevented deposition of sedimentary layers for 1.2 billion years.
Tinfoil. Duct tape would have broken down too soon.
That, of course, leaves open the question of who removed the tinfoil several billion years ago.
“How old are your rocks?”
My rocks are the same age as me.
Does it really, really matter since we’re the ones that created “time”.
The process of planetary formation is a theory not a proven fact. IThat it looks right does not mean that it is right.
As for the time the zircons were formed 4+ billion years ago - there was an article years ago that postulated that the necessary conditions for there formation meant the Earth looked much as it does today - blue skies, large bodies of water etc.
Reference:
Myth of hellish Earth doused in water
Anna Salleh
ABC Science Online
Friday, 6 May 2005
There is a later article with the same tittle on the same site by a different author dated 2 years later which contains only a bit of the original - ABC self-censoring science even back then.
Nonsense. Presuppositions and “facts” unverifiable through experimentation running rampant. Nonsense, just unverifiable propaganda.
A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about some real time.
5.56mm
It was here when I was born so it’s oooooooold.
Don’t know but there is probably multiple PHDs on the government payroll, who couldn’t find gainful employment elsewhere, researching it for the last 40 years.
If Earth had, at one time, been only 51 million miles from the Sun, what would it be like now,4.5 billion years later?
Old.
How old is the Earth? How uncouth! A gentleman doesn’t ask.
How old is the Earth? How uncouth! A gentleman doesn’t ask.
Somebody wake up Ruth Bader Ginsburg and ask her how old the earth is. She was there at its’ birth.
She was the “Ruth” in the old Testament when she was a teenager.
That is why one of the first chocolate candy bars made millennia ago was named “Baby Ruth” in her honor. Besides it has a lot of her characteristics, nuts.
#1. Nice picture of Gneiss and people think it is the oldest rock type known to man. No Schist!