Michael Ackerson, lead author, and geologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History provided new striking evidence that modern-day plate tectonics, that defined Earth's unique ability to support life emerged only 3.6 billion years ago using ancient zircons found on the jack hills of Australia.
Earth is the only known planet that is able to host complex lifeforms, this ability is partly due to a unique planetary feature: plate tectonics. As of yet, no other celestial body is known to have the planet's dynamic crush that split into continental plates that fracture, move, and collide with each other.
Plate Tectonics Explained
Developed in the 1950s to the 1970s, plate tectonics is a theory that the outer shells of the planet are divided into 7 large slabs of rock known as "plates" that glide above the planet's mantle, and inner core.
The Earth's outer layer includes the uppermost mantle and the crust which is referred to as the "lithosphere". It is roughly 100 km thick and below it is the viscous layer of heat within the planet.
Before the unifying theory of plate tectonics, people were forced to come up with unique explanations to their region's distinctive geological features which weren't efficient nor factual. Plate tectonics dictated that anyone would be able to describe their geological features based on the relative motion of the tectonic plates.
What drives plate tectonics is the convection occurring within the Earth's mantle. As hot material near the core rises and cold rocks from the mantle sink, it exhibits the same principles of a pot boiling on a stove.
Ancient Zircons Dating Plate Tectonics
The study published in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters entitled, "Emergence of peraluminous crustal magmas and implications for the early Earth" describes how researchers used ancient zircon found in the jack hills of western Australia as the oldest minerals found on the planet allowing researchers to peer into the Earth's ancient past.
The oldest zircon found dates back to 4.3 billion years ago, meaning that the nearly indestructible mineral was first formed during the planet's infancy at roughly 200 million years old. The minerals also provided the closest thing scientists have to a continuous chemical record of the early days of the nascent world.
Ackerson explained that researchers were in the process of reconstructing how the planet evolved from a molten ball of metal and rock to what we know today. He continues that no other planet found had continents, liquid oceans, or even life. This is why researchers are trying to answer why the Earth is unique.
The team collected 15 grapefruit-sized ancient zircons and reduced them into minerals. Since it is dense it was easy for researchers to separate sand from zircon. To a degree, researchers were able to determine the age of the minerals because each content of uranium allowed them to reverse engineer the existence of the mineral. And is how the team was able to use ancient zircons found in Australia to date tectonic plates to 3.6 billion years ago.
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