Write an essay our planets history cast in stone
Answers
The province of Mpumalanga is home to two of the oldest and best preserved rock sequences found anywhere on our planet, which provide the only direct information from which the earliest history of our planet can be reconstructed.
This historic fact is among several which will be unveiled on Tuesday by a team of researchers assembled by the Mpumalanga government to probe the history, culture and heritage of the province.
The research team was led by historian Peter Delius.
The province's solid bedrock tells a story of immense antiquity - "a story that projects so far back into the past, it is almost impossible to comprehend", says researcher Maarten de Wit.
"It involves a time scale stretching out towards infinity, and takes us back to when the Earth was youthful, a mere 20 percent of its present age. Africa's oldest known rocks come from Mpumalanga and adjacent Swaziland, exposed in the Barberton mountains."
Because the world's oldest fossils have been found here, the area is a Mecca for scientists interested in how the young Earth worked 3 500 000 millenniums BC, and in searching for new clues to the origin of life.
In a sense, Mpumalanga represents the cradle of life. Earth is about 4 550 million years old, but no terrestrial rocks that old have been found.
The rocks of the Barberton Mountain Land are estimated to be about 3 600 million years old.
Here researchers can "read" and interpret the early chapters of Earth's history with some accuracy; and from all over the world, geologists make the scientific pilgrimage to Barberton to study this small fossilised remnant of the young Earth and its earliest inhabitants
The history of the Planet of earth is cast on the stones. Scientist uses the dating technique of carbon dating to know about the age of the rock. Carbon radioactive dating is the process of of identification of the age of the substance by the presence of carbon 12 element which is radioactive in nature on the surface of the substance.
Thus scientist could identify the age of the rocks which are present in the surface of the earth.