Refinement to Earth's age

[Ignitionnet]

Nice little story here.

Guillaume Avice and Bernard Marty peeked inside ancient samples of South African and Australian quartz, dated to 3.4 billion and 2.7 billion years ago respectively, and found xenon gas. The quartz acted like a time capsule, preserving the gas and allowing the researchers to compare modern isotopic ratios of xenon to the stuff that was around billions of years ago.

"The composition of the gases we are looking at changes according the conditions they are found in, which of course depend on the major events in Earth's history,” Avice explained.

“The gas sealed in these quartz samples has been handed down to us in a sort of ‘time capsule’. We are using standard methods to compute the age of the Earth, but having access to these ancient samples gives us new data, and allows us to refine the measurement.”

The maths then shows that the Moon-forming impact occurred around 60 million years earlier than scientists had previously thought, after which the Earth started to develop its atmosphere.

This makes me feel somewhat younger.