Earth and Moon Are 60 Million Years Older Than Previously Believed

Sorry if someone beat me to this, I just saw it & did a quick search to see if someone had made a thread yet. ((I did try to get the article on the Universities site but I was having errors with the site))

Earth & Moon are 60 Million yrs older

Here is a quote from the article:

The oldest rocks ever discovered in our solar system have been dated back about 4.57 billion years, meaning Earth obviously finished forming later than that. However, determining exactly when that happened can be difficult. New research presented by French geochemists from the University of Lorraine at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Sacramento, California has revealed xenon isotopes. These isotopes indicate that the Earth and Moon are 60 million years older than was previously believed.

There aren’t many geological clues from the time our planet originated, just because so much of it has been destroyed over time. Layers of rock which provide a considerable amount of reliable information from other points in the planet’s history just don’t exist that far back. Instead, researchers need to use other techniques, such as analyzing the isotopes of different gasses in rock samples.

A quartz sample from Australia dated back to 2.7 billion years, while quartz from South Africa was found to be 3.4 billion years old. The xenon gas that was trapped inside is reflective of the conditions at the time, which researchers Guillaume Avice and Bernard Marty compared to xenon today. This allowed the researchers to tweak the technique used for dating rock samples, making it more accurate. In doing so, it pushes back the estimated date of the hypothesized impact that formed the moon by about 60 million years (+/- 20 million years).

Interesting study. What do you guys think?

I'm not buying the candles for the birthday cake.

is that an extra 60 million years worth of things we do not know? great

Isn't there rock formations in Maine that date back to the formation of our world?
I could swear I've seen it on TV.......

So what you are saying is they adjusted the age of the earth and moon by about 1%.... big news indeed....

a reply to: Margana

don't tell the bible thumpers! That means its about 6 years older than the 6000 they claim! Remember,Jesus rode a dinosaur to school! LOL

This is quite important news for the academic and scientific fields involved. Thanks OP for the great thread. 60 million years here or there is nothing to sneeze at, and if this proves accurate then many timelines must be adjusted and filled in.

I know it's not a dramatic difference but it's just another study it helps to show how old the Earth is compares to what Young Earth & biblical people think.

a reply to: Margana

Yep, I thought it was going to be an interesting thread, though I had my doubts when I saw this:

don't tell the bible thumpers! That means its about 6 years older than the 6000 they claim! Remember,Jesus rode a dinosaur to school! LOL

I thought, "Eh... there's one of them in every thread . . so what".

And then totally tanked here when the op states:

I know it's not a dramatic difference but it's just another study it helps to show how old the Earth is compares to what Young Earth & biblical people think.

I'm a Christian. You know what I was thinking when I read the op? I was wondering about the "impact that formed the moon" I was wondering if they could tell where that was on the earth, Pacific Ocean maybe?, or if it even was an impact with the earth, and whether I should ask here or go try and find it on my own.

Guess what I'm thinking now?

originally posted by: imwilliam
a reply to: Margana

Yep, I thought it was going to be an interesting thread, though I had my doubts when I saw this:

don't tell the bible thumpers! That means its about 6 years older than the 6000 they claim! Remember,Jesus rode a dinosaur to school! LOL

I thought, "Eh... there's one of them in every thread . . so what".

And then totally tanked here when the op states:

I know it's not a dramatic difference but it's just another study it helps to show how old the Earth is compares to what Young Earth & biblical people think.

I'm a Christian. You know what I was thinking when I read the op? I was wondering about the "impact that formed the moon" I was wondering if they could tell where that was on the earth, Pacific Ocean maybe?, or if it even was an impact with the earth, and whether I should ask here or go try and find it on my own.

Guess what I'm thinking now?

Just because I cracked a joke (I don't know if the other guy was joking) on here doesn't mean that the joke should take away from the main point.

I'm not of a distinct faith, I believe in a higher power but I can also see evolution & don't deny the evidence of fossils & rocks.

I don't think they know exactly where the impact happened on Earth but I wasn't able to get the Universities site to work for me and it didn't say on I f**king Love Science. There have also been other studies published recently that talks about the moon & the Earth colliding.

Science Daily: New Isotopic evidence

new series of measurements of oxygen isotopes provides increasing evidence that the Moon formed from the collision of Earth with another large, planet-sized astronomical body, around 4.5 billion years ago.

This work will be published in Science on 6th June, and will be presented to the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in California on 11th June.

Most planetary scientists believe that the Moon formed from an impact between Earth and a planet-sized body, which has been given the name Theia. Efforts to confirm that the impact had taken place had centred on measuring the ratios between the isotopes of oxygen, titanium, silicon and others. These ratios are known to vary throughout the solar system, but their close similarity between Earth and Moon conflicted with theoretical models of the collision that indicated that the Moon would form mostly from Theia, and thus would be expected to be compositionally different from Earth.