They're not in your vineyard
So stop making silly claims
by PHILIP WHITE
Australian winemakers who naïvely boast that their vines are growing in the
oldest soils on Earth should consider moving their vineyards to Jack Hills, on
Christmas Creek, about 400 kilometres east of Broome in the far north-west of Western Australia, and down a bit.
They could then lay claim to their dirt perhaps containing a few minute specks
of the oldest rock yet found on the planet.
A team led by Professor John Valley, of the University of Wisconsin,
has shown that a speck of zircon found there is 4.374 billion years
old, making it the oldest rock yet found on Earth.
Valley found the tiny crystal (top) in 2001. A comprehensive and reliable
study has finally shown the scepticism of other geologists to be well-placed
but ill-founded.
"This is the oldest known part of the Earth's crust that has yet
been identified," he told ABC reporter, Simon Lauder.
Valley's team eventually used atom-probe tomography to identify
individual atoms of lead in the crystal, leading to confirmation of its age. Not
much larger than the diameter of a human hair, the crystal is so small that the
Professor says that only a person with particularly good eyesight could spot it
in the palm of their hand.
His discovery indicates that the Earth's crust formed
earlier than had been previously believed. This planet formed as a ball of
molten rock about 4.5 billion years ago. The zircon indicates its crust formed
soon after that - 100 million years; only about 160 million years after the formation
of the solar system.
The rocks of the Mount Lofty Ranges, home of the South
Flinders, Clare, Barossa, Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale and Southern Fleurieu
vignobles, are never much older than 1.6 billion years. Granules of these form
their soils, most of which are younger than 10,000 years.
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2 comments:
By God it's beautiful. Proof of very early Christianity. It's a window from the very small Christian church of the day, surely?
What a beautiful thing! It really does look a church window!
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