Archean

This is a really important boundary.

That's the big Archean Belt that stretches all the way to our South Pass Camp, 200 kilometers.

Once we cross that boundary, we're getting into the actual Greenstone Rock.

So we'll stop first at the Iron Formations, which is a great scrubber for gold.

We're gonna see the drill rig at Lewiston.

So it's gonna be a really good day.

We're gonna start by heading up about a half hour to our first stop, which is the actual main Archean belt structure exposed at surface.

So very cool.

A prison, a billion years in the past.

What's the word? Archeozoic,' she supplied.

"'Yeah, Archeozoic.

An Archeozoic prison.

You can escape to your heart's content, but what the hell's the difference? There's no life back here, not yet.

The earth's just a baby.

That's one piece of evidence.

But there's also thought that they may have been mutualists, and the excretory products of one of them, which was a eubacterium, it was making hydrogen and CO2, and the missing piece of this sentence basically is that that would then have been food for the Archean ancestor of the eukaryotic nucleus.

So they could have actually been mutualists.

So there is a slave hypothesis and there's a mutualistic hypothesis, and that hasn't been settled.

Those are easily transmitted to gold exploration.

and I know people have sort of said they've looked at someone like myself and I joined North Arrow to do gold exploration and they know my history in the diamond world but then I remind them that my academic And the first part of my working career was actually in Archean Gold in Northern Canada, working underground at the Combine in Yellowknife and in Red Lake at the Campbell Mine.

And I studied the rocks at the Combine as part of my doctorate thesis.

So I grew up in gold and went over to diamonds, and now I'm back to gold.

Second, a division of volcanic geology is organized, and Captain Clarence E. Dutton of the Ordnance Corps of the Army is placed in charge, also with a strong corps of assistants.

Third and fourth, Two divisions have been organized to prosecute work on the Archean rocks, embracing within their field not only all rocks of Archean age, but all metamorphic crystalline schists of whatever age they may be found.

The first division has for its chief professor, Rafael Pompelli, assisted by a core of geologists, and the field of his work is the crystalline schists of the Appalachian region, or eastern portion of the United States.

extending from northern New England to Georgia.

Yeah.

So at some point in the Archean, we have free atmospheric oxygen because of the photosynthesis that's going on.

Episode 75.

So many numbers.

Um, and so it, it cooled down sufficiently that it was able to precipitate.

And now all of a sudden the, from the Hadean, we're now in the Archean and, uh, we have a lot of water.

It's really, uh, the earth is really, really almost entirely covered with water.

Uh, so what happens next? volcano