Not elder law: world’s oldest bling tells tales about Earth’s early years

Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, but her early eons were tempestuous. Not even rocksurvives from the first 500 million years of her life—an eon known asthe Hadean—because geologists speculate the planet’s surface boiled andbubbled with molten lava under a steady bombardment of comets andmeteorites. But tiny diamonds discovered in antediluvian zirconcrystals sprinkled in three-billion-year old rocks from Australia hintthat the planet’s surface fire might have ceased much earlier thanpreviously believed.

Mineralogy graduate student Martina Menneken of the WestfälischeWilhelms–University of Münster in Germany and her colleagues probed1,000 of these ancient zircon crystals for inclusions—tiny outcroppingsof other minerals hidden in the unusually stable lattice. Theydiscovered diamonds of different shapes and sizes in 45 of the oldcrystals by using a laser technique called Raman spectroscopy.

Source/more:  Scientific American, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=8F37399C-E7F2-99DF-30361B86A598909B&chanID=sa007