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Zircon crystals from the Jack Hills of Western Australia, 4.4 billion years old, carry the oxygen signature of liquid water: an ocean under an early atmosphere within about 150 million years of the Earth's formation.
The mechanism
WATERS BELOW, A SKY ABOVE — an early ocean
How it was checked
- EvidenceT7 PRIMARY DOCUMENT / MEASUREMENT; Status: ADDED 2026-09-19
- Letter eraTHE DECLARATION AND THE DEEP RECORD the awakening to Babel: dated by ruling and by the record, placed by story where the text gives no date
- Plate — Mike Peel, Jack Hills zircon crystals, Western Australia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:At_American_Museum_of_Natural_History_2024_007.jpg
- SourcesMEASUREMENT — detrital zircons, 4.404 billion years (Wilde, Valley, Peck & Graham, Nature 409:175–178, 2001)
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