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Projekt Druckansicht

Exploiting a very-high-resolution Archean surface record

Fachliche Zuordnung Paläontologie
Förderung Förderung von 2011 bis 2014
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 212154569
 
Erstellungsjahr 2014

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

The beginning of Earth history is difficult to reconstruct because virtually all old strata recording conditions at the Earth’s surface have either been subducted and molten or at least been intensely deformed. There are only two places on Earth where well-preserved Paleoarchean rocks are preserved: The Barberton Greenstone Belt (BGB) in South Africa and the Pilbara region in northwest Australia. In the BGB, the strata of the Moodies Group have recently been recognized to have been deposited within only a few Million years, a comparatively short time span compared to their total age, and to record Archean surface processes in exquisite detail. Research conducted here supported field work and limited geochemical analyses to explore some of the consequences of this highly detailed stratigraphic preservation: (1) Whether additional dating would confirm the age and allow an internal age stratigraphy to be constructed (it did); (2) whether stacked tidal strata recorded an ebb-and-flood signal from a much closer and faster-orbiting Moon than today (they probably do not, at least not at the sites we investigated); (3) whether a thick basaltic lava that covered an ancient coastal plain had weathered to a primitive soil (it probably did not but there are soils elsewhere); and (4) whether one could trace biological components in these strata through their elevated radioactivity (one probably cannot). Some of these aspects attract the attention of the South African public and have been incorporated in public talks, roadside panels, and popular-science guidebooks.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

 
 

Zusatzinformationen

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