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A
t first glance, it might seem
there’s little more to the Arc-
tic than frozen tundra, ice
and seawater, but the top
of the world is home to some unique
geology and an impressive array of min-
eral resources. A new project led by the
Geological Survey of Norway (GSN) has
compiled all existing geologic data about
the Circum-Arctic region into a book,
database and interactive map.
“The Arctic region contains numer-
ous, large mineral deposits, which in all
probability will be studied and mined in
the years to come,” said GSN lead inves-
tigator Rognvald Boyd, in a statement.
“The [European Union] has a strong
focus on securing access to metals innearby areas, and especially on knowl-
edge of commodities of which there
is, or may develop, a critical scar-
city,” Boyd noted. The same could
be said of other countries with
Arctic interests.
At present, the Arctic boasts
28 known diamond deposits and
207 large metal deposits, including
gold, silver, copper and platinum,
though not all of these have been
fully explored or mined yet. “The
results of the project will be of interest
for the mining industry, for prospect-
ing companies, for scientists involved in
research on metal deposits in the region
and also for decision-makers,” Boyd said.
Mary Caperton Morton2MRIVEPWHIJSVQIHF]QIXISVMXIWVIZIEPEKISJMQTEGX
R
esearchers have discovered
a new way to determine
when a meteorite hit Earth,
a technique that could not
only help scientists date ancient meteorite
strikes but also determine when planetary
crusts first formed.
Desmond Moser, a geologist at the
University of Western Ontario and
co-author of the new study in Nature
Communications, and his team ana-
lyzed crystals of baddeleyite deformed
by shockwaves during the impact atSudbury in Canada about 2 billion years
ago. Baddeleyite, a rare zirconium oxide
mineral found in terrestrial rocks and
meteorites, contains trace amounts of
radioactive uranium and lead, useful in
calculating the age of collision.
“These [crystals] can be used as
tiny clocks that are the basis for our
geologic timescale,” Moser said in a
statement. “But because these crystals
are a banged-up mess, conventional
methods won’t help in extracting age
data from them.”Using an atom probe, the scientists sliced
and lifted out tiny pieces of the mineral that
represent when the stopwatch was started
after impact, thus allowing them to date the
impact to 1.852 billion years ago, plus or
minus 45 million years. “The really cool part
of the paper is the fact that we generated the
correct age from a piece of rock effectively
1/1,000 the width of a human hair, pulling
it apart atom by atom in the process,” says
Lee White of the Royal Ontario Museum
in Canada and lead author of the study.
Sarah DerouinWright says, so, in that sense, “the cor-
relation is not much of a surprise.” The
work is a good start, but “not an end to
research on this topic,” he says.
Wright says he sees the technique
in this study potentially opening a new
avenue for Silk Road mapping, using
grass instead of gravity to predict flows
through the mountains, and adds that
it could be applied to model lowland
pasture areas as well, or modified by
taking different herding methods into
account. Additionally, finding previouslyunknown Silk Road sites or other evi-
dence by searching along grass-defined
routes would make a good case for the
model’s predictive abilities.
“Modern archaeology is seeing a flo-
rescence of testable mapping models,”
Wright says, thanks to the improving
resolution, scale and availability of satel-
lite data and regional surveys like those
used in this work. “This is good for the
field — different ideas offer routes to
study and compare.”
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