Earth’s oldest crater really is over 3 billion years old, new study confirms

By Chris Kirkland, Professor of Geochronology, Curtin University

In the Pilbara of Western Australia, some of Earth’s oldest rocks lie beneath the sky, as they have for billions of years. They are dark, weathered volcanic rocks, close to 3.5 billion years old, cut by veins and stewed by deep time.

Their survival is remarkable. Most rocks this old have moved back into Earth’s interior. These ones, still on the surface, have changed, but not enough to erase their first story.

In places, they still preserve the rounded forms of pillow basalts – lava that erupted underwater and cooled on an ancient sea floor.

The same rock record…

Read complete article

~	6 Executed as Jordan Resumes Death Penalty

~	How high can a volcano throw lava up in the air?

~	Citizenship education: primary school children are already able to think politically

~	Helping their friends to read can boost children’s attainment

~	Did Kenya’s Gen Z protests achieve anything? An economist weighs up what’s changed and what’s stayed the same

~	Gulf States: Migrant Workers’ Heat Protections Fall Short

~	Libya/EU: Rival authorities intensify xenophobic and racist crackdown on refugees and migrants in Libya as EU seeks to deepen ties

~	Cuba: Four years after an unjust conviction, Afro-Cuban artists remain imprisoned for expressing themselves

~	Cheap, effective and dangerous: how Australian farmers came to depend on the toxic weedkiller paraquat

~	View from The Hill: Longer NDIS inquiry is bad for the government, costing ‘a few hundred million dollars’