27-November-2008, 11:31 AM
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Order of Kilopi
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Posts: 4,787
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Early plate tectonics: more evidence for a cooler Hadean
First water, now this: Plate-tectonics may have started over 4bn years ago
Quote:
"We are proposing that there was plate-tectonic activity in the first 500 million years of Earth's history," said geochemistry professor Mark Harrison, director of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and co-author of the Nature paper. "We are reporting the first evidence of this phenomenon."
Hopkins analyzed the zircons with UCLA's high-resolution ion microprobe, an instrument that enables scientists to date and learn the exact composition of samples with enormous precision. The microprobe shoots a beam of ions, or charged atoms, at a sample, releasing from the sample its own ions, which are then analyzed in a mass spectrometer. Scientists can aim the beam of ions at specific microscopic areas of a sample and conduct a high-resolution isotope analysis of them without destroying the object.
"The global average heat flow in the Earth's first 500 million years was thought to be about 200 to 300 milliwatts per meter squared," Hopkins said. "Our zircons are indicating a heat flow of just 75 milliwatts per meter squared — the figure one would expect to find in subduction zones, where two plates converge, with one moving underneath the other."
"The data we are reporting are from zircons from between 4 billion and 4.2 billion years ago," Harrison said. "The evidence is indirect, but strong. We have assessed dozens of scenarios trying to imagine how to create magmas in a heat flow as low as we have found without plate tectonics, and nothing works; none of them explain the chemistry of the inclusions or the low melting temperature of the granites."
Evidence for water on Earth during the planet's first 500 million years is now overwhelming, according to Harrison.
"You don't have plate tectonics on a dry planet," he said.
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It's a good article. Here's the link again: Link 
p.s. seeing as this strictly matches the title but not the OP, plus the fact that there seem to be many geologists here, I might mirror this as new thread. If no-one minds.
Last edited by PraedSt; 27-November-2008 at 02:24 PM..
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