Earth’s Oldest Surface Sheds Light on Changing Planet

Desert Pavement in the Rub’ al-Khali. Scale cube measures 1cm on a side
Photo by Meteorite Recon on Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons License.

Newspapers, among them the New York Daily News, reported today based on a report on LiveScience that scientists in the Negev have discovered the Earth’s oldest surface. What’s that, you say?
Basically, Planet Earth is a constantly evolving and changing place. Wind, rain, and other forces are always at work, ensuring that the planet’s surface doesn’t look entirely the same from one day to the next. So it’s pretty remarkable to find an area (that looks like the one in the photo above) that hasn’t changed in 1.8 million years. The big question, you might ask, is why we should care about a large expanse of really old rocks. Well, by understanding why things don’t change, we can also try to understand how and why they do. That way, we can learn a lot about how the Earth works and the impact of all these forces on our changing planet. (You can find the article abstract on the website of the GSA Journal.)

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