“ever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it isalive, it ionary and knotRidley. e are all t of a single genetic trick ion togeneration nearly four billion years, to sucent t you can take a fragment of ic instruction, patc into a faulty yeast cell, and t cell it to s o is its own.
t—sits on a sope geoc named Victoria Bennett in tralianNational University in Canberra. An American, Ms. Bennett came to tract in 1989 and ed e 2001, sly y ernating stripesof z and a gray-green material called clinopyroxene. t rocks t marine sediments ever found.
“e can’t be certain t to find out,” Bennett told me. “But it comes from ted, so it probably .” Nor ualfossilized microbes, turned ocean mud to stone. Instead t beopes and a type of pe called apatite, rong evidence t tained colonies of living t t t said. “It as basic as life can get—but it lived. It propagated.”
And eventually it led to us.
If you are into very old rocks, and Bennett indubitably is, to be. to ty of a man named Bill Compston, in t t Sensitive ion Ion MicroProbe—or S is more affectionately knos initial letters. t measures te of uranium in tiny minerals called zircons. Zirconsappear in most rocks apart from basalts and are extremely durable, surviving every naturalprocess but subduction. Most of t o t somepoint, but just occasionally—in estern Australia and Greenland, for example—geologistscrops of rocks t ton’s maco be dated otype Sand macment’s os on a budget, but it . On its first formal test, in1982, it dated t ternAustralia.
“It caused quite a stir at time,” Bennett told me, “to find sometant soquickly echnology.”
Sook me doo see t model, S eel apparatus, per long and five feet asa deep-sea probe. At a console in front of it, keeping an eye on ever-crings offigures on a screen, erbury University in Ney-four many rocks to date. It after 9A.M. and Bob ill noon. Ask a pair ofgeocs art talking about isotopicabundances and ionization levels is more endearin