Earth may have had fresh, not just salty, water as soon as 600 million years after the planet formed — a mere blink of an eye in geologic time.
Researchers analyzed oxygen molecules within 4-billion-year-old zircon crystals from Western Australia’s Jack Hills, one of the oldest rock formations on Earth. The relative proportions of oxygen’s heaviest and lightest forms, or isotopes, in the zircons are possible only if there been a significant amount of freshwater present, geochemist Hamed Gamaleldien of Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi and colleagues report June 3 in Nature Geoscience.
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