Earth’s oldest minerals date onset of plate tectonics to 3.6 billion years ago – Phys.Org

The study, published May 14 in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters, uses zircons, the oldest minerals ever found on Earth, to peer back into the planet’s ancient past.The oldest of the zircons in the study, which came from the Jack Hills of Western Australia, were around 4.3 billion years oldwhich means these nearly indestructible minerals formed when the Earth itself was in its infancy, only roughly 200 million years old. Along with other ancient zircons collected from the Jack Hills spanning…

Click here to view the original article.