Dates For Cataclysms On The Early Earth And The Moon Need A Rethink

Durable crystals called zircons are used to date some of the earliest and most dramatic cataclysms of the solar system. One is the super-duty collision that ejected material from Earth to form the moon roughly 50 million years after Earth formed. Another is the late heavy bombardment, a wave of impacts that may have created hellish surface conditions on the young Earth, about 4 billion years ago. Both events are accepted but unproven and the dates were estimated from zircons retrieved from the moon during NASA's Apollo voyages in the 1970s. read more

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