
The South African mountains older than continents - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180920-the-south-african-mountains-older-than-continents
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scrappyjoe
These mountains are part of a craton that split when Australia cleaved off
Africa. Barberton Gold Mines have a mineralization that is unique in South
Africa - they actually use bacteria to cleave the gold from sulphates, if I
recall. Turns out the Australian section also has gold, and the chemistry to
process the gold is the same.

The Barberton gold deposits were formed in an interesting process where gold
saturated fluids burst into underground fissures, and the resulting rapid
cooling led to crystallization. The layout of the deposits a highly
unpredictable. You can mine nothing for hundreds of meters (which takes years)
before hitting a chamber that will sustain you for a decade. Super
interesting. And hard to run a business like that.

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aogl
I used to live right there in that province and never knew how old they were,
this is really interesting!

Thanks for posting.

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kijin
What does it mean for a mountain range to be older than the continent it's on?

The article doesn't seem to go deep enough into the logistics of this apparent
contradiction. Did the mountain range appear in the middle of the ocean and
the continent gradually formed around it? Or was the mountain range simply
part of an ancient continent that isn't immediately recognizable as Africa,
but parts of which eventually became parts of Africa?

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tim333
The first one - "one of the first landmasses to rise out of the ocean"

Here's an action replay. If you follow the red blob I think that must be the
mountains. I recommend setting the speed to 2x
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovT90wYrVk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovT90wYrVk4)

There was a lot of moving going on. The purple bit seems to have ended up as
the Hamersley Range in Australia. ([http://www.oldest.org/nature/mountain-
ranges/](http://www.oldest.org/nature/mountain-ranges/))

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nemacol
I am sure there is a lot of great science, data, and tons of work by a lot of
people behind this video. But I am having a hard time shaking the thought "How
could they possibly know that".

Just mind blowing that it could recreate all that movement. Imperfect as to
the details, sure.

Thank you for sharing.

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tim333
I was wondering how they figured it too. There must be some guess work. It
seems to work a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle where if say the shapes and
fossil species match you can figure they were next to each other at the time
of the fossils. [https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-Tectonics/Chap1-Pioneers-
of...](https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-Tectonics/Chap1-Pioneers-of-Plate-
Tectonics/Alfred-Wegener/Fossil-Evidence-from-the-Southern-Hemisphere)

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sizzzzlerz
This is what science does. It's human attempts to explain the natural world we
observe and to make suggestions as to how it got that way and how it works.
Scientists don't claim that they have the final answer or that ancient events
had to have happened they way they explain. They are just claiming an
explanation that is consistent with the facts and observations they have.

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qubax
The oldest verified impact structure is in south africa as well.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892966)

I have a sneaking suspicion that journalists spend most of their time on
social media sites like HN and just repackage stories they read here.

Also, the title should read "South African mountains older than current
continents".

The article mentions it is older than the african continent and that is
correct. But that doesn't make it older than continents in general. The
Makhonjwa Mountains and Vaalbara ( the first supercontinent ) were created in
the same time period.

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sgt
Great article. I am not too far from there now. Thanks for posting!

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EamonnMR
What is this? It's not an article because it's a bunch of unconnected
paragraphs, but it's not a listicle because it's not numbered and the items
don't have names. I'm stumped.

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casper345
"what are men to rocks and mountains"

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projektfu
It's weird to me when the article fails to load because of uMatrix. The actual
content is not being delivered by the page load, but the boilerplate is. I
wasn't able to access the article after turning on everything from BBC, so
they must be waiting until some external tracker loads before presenting the
content.

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whoopdedo
Would it work if you used a UK proxy/VPN? I recall there are different
advertising rules for the BBC when serving domestic and foreign visitors.

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Angostura
This is a bbc.com URL, should be internationally available.

Works for me in the UK FWIW, Safari Mac.

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chrxr
I don't think that's the issue being referred to. BBC.com has no advertising
when viewed within the UK. Outside the UK it has a ton of adverts and
tracking. So using UK VPN should get around those things.

