Diamonds found in Earth's oldest crystals! Gems in 4.3-billion-year-old zircon baffle geologists., page 1

Hi all,

Just found this fresh news.
If it´s true we can rewrite the history how the earth formed.
Diamonds have been found in some of Earth's oldest rocks, dating back to 4.3 billion years ago.

Offcourse not everyone thinks it true

"I think it's going to turn out to be young diamonds, but I'm quite happy to be proven wrong," says Williams.

Read the story here:

www.nature.com...

Detrital zircons more than 4 billion years old from the Jack Hills metasedimentary belt, Yilgarn craton, Western Australia, are the oldest identified fragments of the Earth's crust1, 2 and are unique in preserving information on the earliest evolution of the Earth. Inclusions of quartz, K-feldspar and monazite in the zircons3, in combination with an enrichment of light rare-earth elements4, 5 and an estimated low zircon crystallization temperature6, have previously been used as evidence for early recycling of continental crust, leading to the production of granitic melts in the Hadean era. Here we present the discovery of microdiamond inclusions in Jack Hills zircons with an age range from 3,058 7 to 4,252 7 million years. These include the oldest known diamonds found in terrestrial rocks, and introduce a new dimension to the debate on the origin of these zircons and the evolution of the early Earth6, 7, 8, 9, 10. The spread of ages indicates that either conditions required for diamond formation were repeated several times during early Earth history or that there was significant recycling of ancient diamond. Mineralogical features of the Jack Hills diamonds—such as their occurrence in zircon, their association with graphite and their Raman spectroscopic characteristics—resemble those of diamonds formed during ultrahigh-pressure metamorphism and, unless conditions on the early Earth were unique, imply a relatively thick continental lithosphere and crust–mantle interaction at least 4,250 million years ago