Toward understanding early Earth evolution: Prescription for approach from terrestrial noble gas and light element records in lunar soils
- 18 November 2008
- journal article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 105 (46), 17654-17658
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0806596105
Abstract
Because of the almost total lack of geological record on the Earth's surface before 4 billion years ago, the history of the Earth during this period is still enigmatic. Here we describe a practical approach to tackle the formidable problems caused by this lack. We propose that examinations of lunar soils for light elements such as He, N, O, Ne, and Ar would shed a new light on this dark age in the Earth's history and resolve three of the most fundamental questions in earth science: the onset time of the geomagnetic field, the appearance of an oxygen atmosphere, and the secular variation of an Earth-Moon dynamical system.This publication has 30 references indexed in Scilit:
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