The 4.4 Billion Year Old Crystal Found in the Australian Outback

On a working sheep station in remote Western Australia, scattered among ordinary looking rock and red dust, sits material older than almost anything else ever found on this planet. A microscopic crystal, dated to 4.4 billion years old, the oldest known fragment of Earth's crust ever discovered anywhere on the planet, confirmed through a technique precise enough to track the position of individual atoms. What that crystal has revealed since goes far beyond a record breaking number. Evidence of oceans and continental crust far earlier than anyone expected. A possible trace of carbon that could push back the earliest signs of life on Earth by hundreds of millions of years. This video goes inside Jack Hills, the outback site where geologists are still piecing together what the earliest chapters of this planet actually looked like, one crystal at a time.

#geography #ancienthistory #australia