Short and sweet, since I’m trying to work on my grad school application today. I’ve gotten to the most terrifying part – the “statement of purpose.”
Banded Iron Formations: A New Depositional Model
I don’t personally know that much about banded iron formations (BIFs); we talked about them a little in geochemistry. They’re basically very old rocks (between 1.7 and 3.8 billion years old) that show a very distinctive banding of iron rich and iron deficient layers. There’s been a lot of debate about how they might have formed, so the new possible model is interesting. If nothing else, BIFs tell us something very important, just like the old komatiites we can still find, namely that you can’t find any younger than 1.7 billion years. That means around that time, something big changed in the Earth’s geochemistry, as well as in its internal heating system. (Or really, several interconnected somethings.) I’m looking forward to when we know what exactly the change was, because that has a lot of implications in regards to how planets like ours form and change over time.