Oldest Life on Earth
This is why I came so far. To see some of the oldest rocks on Earth, preserved within an extremely ancient remnant of a continental “core”, or craton in geological parlance, revealing the rocks of my field trip to be as old as 3.48 billion – that’s 3,480,000,000 – years before present. Cratons are the formative kernels, or foundational building blocks of the continents, whispering their stories about the early evolution of our planet to those who are listening. What is extra special about the rocks of the east Pilbara craton is that they contain sedimentary sequences formed in the lulls between voluminous volcanic eruptions which archive the earliest signs of life found so far on Earth. The shocker is that life was already diverse and surprisingly abundant by this time, so very long ago, hinting at a much earlier but now obscured history. So there aren’t really very many other places on Earth where one can peer into “Deep Time” to get a picture of how and where life was taking took hold, let alone to see what it looked like.