Ancient Earth Remnants Discovered in Deep Rock Samples
(MENAFN) Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), alongside global partners, have identified rare traces of “proto Earth,” the planet's primitive ancestor that existed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.
This discovery provides valuable insight into the material that existed before the colossal impact event that shaped the Earth as we know it today.
These groundbreaking results were made public on Tuesday in Nature Geosciences, as reported by ScienceDaily.
“This is maybe the first direct evidence that we've preserved the proto Earth materials,” stated Nicole Nie, the Paul M. Cook career development assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at MIT.
“We see a piece of the very ancient Earth, even before the giant impact. This is amazing because we would expect this very early signature to be slowly erased through Earth's evolution,” she added, expressing the significance of the discovery.
The research group uncovered an unusual chemical marker in deep rock samples obtained from regions in Greenland, Canada, and the U.S. state of Hawaii.
These rocks exhibited a deficiency in the potassium-40 isotope when compared to typical modern Earth materials.
This unusual chemical trait implies that the rock formations may harbor minute fragments of the proto Earth that have endured through eons of planetary transformation.
According to the published study, such remnants could have withstood the intense geological processes that reshaped the planet.
Experts have long tried to determine Earth’s original chemical structure by analyzing the composition of various meteorite groups.
However, as Nie elaborated, “our study shows that the current meteorite inventory is not complete, and there is much more to learn about where our planet came from.”
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