The rocks were found by researchers in 2017 near the municipality of Nunavik as part of a master’s project that was being completed by Christian Sole at the University of Ottawa. Jonathan O’Neil, who supervised the study, said that at the time, the rocks in the area had been estimated to be about 3.8 million years old, but new testing has dated them back even further to 4.16 billion years, or from the Hadean eon (4.6 billion to 4 billion years ago).
“Everybody agrees that [the rocks in northern Quebec are] at least 3.8 billion years old, but not everybody agrees that they were actually Hadean. Now with that new study, I think we’re going to firmly confirm that these rocks are Hadean and the oldest rocks on Earth,” O’Neil told The Epoch Times in an interview.
He said the test results confirm that the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt, a volcano-sedimentary sequence, may be the only place where rocks formed during the Hadean eon have still been preserved.
“[The rocks offer] a unique window into Earth’s early history,” said O’Neil, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa.
“Rocks for us are like books. We’re reading the books that are the rocks and the mineral that through their mineralogy, their petrology, their chemistry, all of this, it helps us to reconstruct the geological conditions, the tectonic settings, how things were moving, the temperature, the pressures, all of these things.”
The research team was led by O’Neil, and included Sole; Hanika Rizo, professor at Carlton University; Jean-Louis Paquette, a now-deceased researcher at France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique; David Benn, former uOttawa undergraduate student; and Joeli Plakholm, former undergraduate student at Carleton University.
The rock-dating process combined petrology and geochemistry, using two radiometric dating methods that use isotopes, with both results coming back at 4.16 million years.
O’Neil said residents of the municipality have been hesitant to let anyone else come sample rocks after some misuse by researchers.
“They’re actually looking into ways to try to protect this and making sure if by any chance, they let the community, the scientific community, come back and do some more research, but done in a way that could guarantee that nobody would misbehave or behave unethically for this.”
He said other parts of Canada also have significantly old rock samples, including in the Northwest Territories, which have rocks dated back to about 4 billion years ago. Some very old rocks have also been found in Northern Newfoundland and Labrador.
