Re: Early Earth likely had continents, was habitable, according to new study


"Aidan Karley" <doIlookDAFTenoughTOpost@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote in message
news:VA.00000a08.22dd8718@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In article <1132286476.678042.181230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Landy wrote:
>> But we've known about this for 10 years. What's new?
>>
> We've known about the great antiquity of the Jack Hills zircons
> for around 10 years, but the oxygen isotope data (that suggests the
> presence of a water cycle including major surface water quantities
> during the Hadean) is much newer - only really 3 or 4 years old.
>
>> Perhaps someone is trying to get grant $....
>>
> Or just possibly, since the first suggestions of an early wet
> Earth (3-4 years ago) were based on samples from one area (Jack Hills),
> people have since been trying to find comparable samples from other
> areas to validate (or invalidate!) the hypothesis. You have heard about
> the difficulties of doing statistics on samples of one, haven't you?
> All those expressions of the form [something]/(n-1), where 'n' is
> number of samples.
>
> I listened to these programs (
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/madeforlife.shtml ) a few months
> ago, which may be informative to you. Programme 1 from about 12 minutes
> in.
> Ohh, I've just worked out the sequence of hoops to jump through
> to MP3 the program! Very useful - I can set the machine to record off
> the radio, then put them onto the MP3 player to listen to when I'm on
> the bus with lousy reception.
>
> --
> Aidan Karley,
> Aberdeen, Scotland,
> Location: 57°10'11" N, 02°08'43" W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
>

Ugh! It requires real player, which I refuse to install on my computer.
Oh well. I believe I've seen a similar program on the Discovery channel.
Thanks for the link anyway, Aiden.

George


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