Geology

1 Pages 273 Words

Current Events

I chose an article from the May 2002 National Geographic Magazine. My article is about arguments surrounding the age of the earth. Due to previous beliefs of the earth’s age and new contrasting discoveries geologists are in conflict over merits of both theories. It was formerly believed that rock samples found on Akilia, a small island off the coast of Greenland, were at least 3.85 billion years old, and that they contained evidence of the earliest life forms of earth. After a reexamination of the rocks by geologists Chris Fedo and Martin Whitehouse, arguments are arising as two conclusions were made: One is that the deposits aren’t as old as believed, and two is that they might not contain the remnants of living things at all. These two conclusions are already being challenged by other geologists around the world.
This article also explains how theories about how the banded rocks of Akilia came to be. One theory suggests that the rocks formed at a time when watery environments existed, also concluding that they are sedimentary rocks. The second theory implies that the rocks are igneous, and that due to some biological mechanisms the values that living things generate may have been mimicked. The first theory says that the stripes on the rocks were formed gradually, as material in the water drifted down, settling on the ocean floor, and eventually hardening into stone. Contrastly the second theory indicates that the iron-rich igneous rock formed first from a volcano. Afterwards as the volcano cooled heated water carried dissolved minerals that stuck into cracks of the rock and hardened into veins of white quartz....