Sentences with phrase «zircon studies»

Not exact matches

The researchers, led by Elizabeth Bell — a postdoctoral scholar in Harrison's laboratory — studied more than 10,000 zircons originally formed from molten rocks, or magmas, from Western Australia.

The new study confirms that zircon crystals from Western Australia's Jack Hills region crystallized 4.4 billion years ago, building on earlier studies that used lead isotopes to date the Australian zircons and identify them as the oldest bits of the Earth's crust.

«This confirms our view of how the Earth cooled and became habitable,» says Valley, a geochemist whose studies of zircons, the oldest known terrestrial materials, have helped portray how the Earth's crust formed during the first geologic eon of the planet.

To test this idea, researchers from Trinity College Dublin decided to study a much younger impact crater to see if zircon crystals similar to the very old ones could possibly have formed in these violent settings.

Geologist have further said that the study on the zircon rocks would allow us to discover facts such as when water first existed on the Earth, how our climate changed and when life came on Earth.

Just two years ago a group had studied the likely timing of impacts on the early Earth and they suggested that these impacts might explain the ages of the ancient zircons.»

For the study, they looked at data for roughly 120,000 zircon grains from thousands of samples across the globe.