Lasers pave the path for finding ancient crust.researchers have discovered evidence of an approximately four billion-year-old piece of the Earth’s crust that exists beneath the South-West of Western Australia by using lasers smaller than a human hair to target microscopic grains of a mineral extracted from beach sand.
“There is evidence that an up to four billion-year-old piece of crust about the size of Ireland has been influencing the geological evolution of WA for the past few billions of years and is a key ingredient of rocks formed in WA across this time,” Mr. Droellner states. Research supervisor Dr. Milo Barham, also from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group within Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said no large-scale study of this region had been done before and the results, when compared with existing data, had revealed exciting new insights.