Billion Year Old Whoops
Creation Safari has the scoop on a recent change of dating in the geological world. The Barberton greenstone belt, in South Africa, has been previously interpreted as the Earth's most ancient submarine hydrothermal vent deposits, at the decrepit age of 3.55 billion years. (Note: and used as the basis of research and hypothesis into early life) The geological formation has been redated to the pleistocene era, which is around 1.8 million years old. Yep, they have redated it to around .05% of it's original date. Of course, how reliable this new date is, is unknown as no doubt it is based on it's own assumptions.

A few geologists I know made the point that all this billions of years stuff doesn't help them in their practical work. This is just another example of the irrelevance of the old age dates to real geology, otherwise, how do you explain that a figure that was wrong by over 99.9% caused no problems in practical geology?

For bonus research, check out the wikipedia article on this formation. Note the matter of fact way that the 3.5Bya dates are given and the great just so story telling that accompanies it. I'll bet you money that this belt was dated using radio-isotope dating. Whoops.

You can see the full article here.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Monday, January 08, 2007