In the Jack Hills of Western Australia, a grain of zircon small enough to sit on a fingertip has been dated to 4.404 billion years old, and a 2025 study puts the Moon\u2019s own final crystallization at almost exactly that same moment. This is one of the oldest known fragments of Earth, and it may be roughly as old as a finished Moon itself, or very close to it.<\/p>\n
A crystal barely bigger than a dust mite<\/p>\n
The grain in question was first identified by Simon Wilde and colleagues, who dated it using uranium-lead geochronology and published the result in Nature in 2001<\/a>. Later work by John Valley\u2019s team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, using atom-probe tomography, confirmed the age in 2014 after some researchers had questioned whether the original dating method could be trusted at this extreme. The crystal itself measures around 400 micrometres across, roughly the width of a house dust mite or a few human hairs bundled together, and it glows blue when struck by an electron beam despite looking translucent red to the naked eye.<\/p>\n Zircon survives conditions that destroy almost everything else. It resists melting, weathering, and chemical alteration well enough that a grain can be tumbled down a river, buried for billions of years, and still preserve an intact record of the moment it first crystallized. That durability is the entire reason Jack Hills zircons exist to be studied at all. The grains eroded out of rock that is itself around 3 billion years old, but the zircons trapped inside were already ancient by the time that host rock formed.<\/p>\n What the crystal was doing there in the first place<\/p>\n Around 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized body struck the young Earth, an impact energetic enough to melt and homogenise much of the planet and fling off the debris that became the Moon. The Jack Hills zircon\u2019s oxygen isotopes suggest it crystallized afterward, in the presence of liquid water at relatively low temperature, evidence for what geologists call a cool early Earth, meaning the planet had already cooled enough for oceans well before scientists once assumed.<\/p>\n That idea reshaped how the Hadean eon, Earth\u2019s first geological chapter, gets described. For a long time, the assumption was a planet still glowing from its own formation, hostile to anything resembling water or life for hundreds of millions of years. Trace element evidence from Jack Hills zircons has instead suggested crust and surface water within roughly 100 to 200 million years of the planet forming, and some researchers have argued this pushes the earliest plausible window for life on Earth back further than the traditional boundary between the Hadean and the following Archean eon allowed for.<\/p>\n A Moon that took its time finishing<\/p>\n The Moon-forming impact itself was fast, but the Moon it produced was not instantly solid. It started as a global ocean of molten rock, and working out how long that ocean took to crystallize has been genuinely contested for decades, with different studies proposing anywhere from tens of millions of years to as much as 200 million years. A study published in January 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used the radioactive decay of lutetium into hafnium in lunar zircons brought back by Apollo missions to pin the Moon\u2019s crystallization at more than 99 percent complete around 4.429 billion years ago, with an uncertainty of about 76 million years in either direction<\/a>. That range comfortably overlaps with the Jack Hills zircon\u2019s own age of 4.404 billion years, and a separate 2009 study of an actual lunar zircon dated a crystal from the Moon itself to 4.417 billion years<\/a>, used at the time as a hard younger limit on when the lunar magma ocean could have finished solidifying.<\/p>\n Put those numbers side by side and the comparison in the original claim holds up: a fingertip-sized fragment of ancient Earth and the Moon\u2019s own last drops of magma were, as far as current dating can tell, cooling down at roughly the same time.<\/p>\n What I find genuinely strange about this<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just that the crystal is old. It\u2019s that something this small and this fragile-looking has outlasted almost the entire physical Earth it formed on. Continents have assembled and broken apart, oceans have opened and closed, and entire mountain ranges have risen and eroded back to nothing since this grain first locked its atoms into place, and it has simply kept sitting there, chemically unbothered, the whole time. Geologists have now sorted through more than 100,000 individual zircon grains from the Jack Hills belt, most of them far younger than the record holder, and each one is its own tiny, closed capsule of a moment in Earth\u2019s history that nothing since has been able to reopen.<\/p>\n Standards<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tSpace Daily articles are edited and fact-checked before publication. We use AI tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards<\/a> and masthead<\/a>.\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the Jack Hills of Western Australia, a grain of zircon small enough to sit on a fingertip…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":566033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-566032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}