The mystery of creating a screen
The team, led by geologist Michael Ackerson, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, USA, brought oil and provided new evidence that modern plate tectonics, a characteristic of the Earth's characteristics and the ability to support life on Earth, appeared about 3.6 billion years ago, according to Phys.org.
Earth, the only known living planet in the universe, and one unique feature of this planet is tectonic plates.
No other science-knowing planet has a shell like Earth. The Earth's crust is divided into moving continental plates, broken and colliding with each other. The plate creates a connection between the chemical reactor inside the Earth and the surface of the Earth with an environment where humans can live today. But when and how the plaque formation began is still a mystery, buried under geological time for billions of years.
The study was published on May 14 in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters. Scientists are using zircon, the oldest mineral ever found on Earth, to learn about the ancient past of the planet.
The oldest Zircon in research was taken from Jack Hills in Western Australia, about 4.3 billion years old. This means that these almost indestructible minerals were formed when the Earth was stillborn, only about 200 million years old.
Along with other ancient zircon collected from Jack Hills, which stretches the Earth's earliest history to 3 billion years, these minerals provide what the researchers have found in the continental chemical records of the early world.
We are recreating how the Earth has changed from a hot rock and metal ball to what we have today. No other planet has a continent, a open ocean or life. In a way, we are trying to answer the question of why Earth is the only thing, and we can answer this question to some extent through these zircones," Ackerson said.
Cluees for the appearance of life on Earth
To look at the billion-year past of the Earth, Ackerson and his team collected 15 grapefruit-sized rocks from Jack Hills and ground them into sand.
The research team tested more than 3,500 zircon by detonating them with laser beams and then measuring the chemical composition with a scattered mass. These studies show the age and basic chemistry of each zircon. Of the thousands of minerals tested, about 200 are suitable for research.
The age of zircons can be determined with high accuracy because each zircon contains uranium. The aluminum content of each zircon is also of interest to the research team.
After analyzing the results of hundreds of useful zircones out of thousands of zircones tested, Ackerson and his colleagues described a significant increase in aluminum levels around 3.6 billion years ago.
This component change is likely to mark the beginning of modern patchwork creation and is likely to signal the emergence of life on Earth. But we will need more research to determine the link between this geological shift and the origin of life," said Ackerson.
The line of reasoning to link highly aluminum zircons with the start of a dynamic shell with plaque formation is: One of the few ways for highly aluminum zircons to form is to melt rock deeper under the Earth's surface.
It is difficult to put aluminum in zircones because of their chemical bonds. There must be some fairly severe geological conditions," Ackerson noted.
He explained that signs of the rock melting deeper below the Earth's surface mean the Earth's crust getting thicker and cools, and the thickening of the Earth's crust is a sign of the transition to modern plate formation.
Previous research on the 4-billion-year-old Acasta Gneiss in northern Canada also showed that the Earth's crust is thickening, causing rocks to melt deeper inside the planet. The results from Acasta Gneiss give us more confidence in our explanation of zircon Jack Hills, adds Ackerson, a scientist.
