Made-in-Wisconsin Atom Probe Assisted Dating of Oldest Piece of Earth
Thursday, April 17, 2014 - 12:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
It's a scientific axiom: big claims require extra-solid evidence. So when University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscience professor John Valley dated an ancient crystal to 4.4 billion years ago, skeptics questioned the dating. Then, in 2013, Valley's colleagues at CAMECA put the zircon inside an ultra-precise atom probe and, Valley says, got "data that answered the most serious of the challenges going back to 2001."