At a sheep ranch in Western Australia comes the oldest slice of earth we know. Scientists say they have dated an ancient crystal called a zircon to about 4.4 billion years, making it the earliest confirmed piece of the planet’s crust.

“This is the oldest and the best dated of all the crystals that have been reported,” said John Valley, lead study author and professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The crystal is a translucent red but glows bright blue when bombarded with electrons. At 400 micrometers long it’s biggest dimension is no bigger that the average household dust mite, or about four human hairs.

The crystal was found in an arid region north of Perth, Australia, in a low range of hills called the Jack Hills and scientists have been researching it since 2001.

Scientists say the crystal’s chemistry specifically, the ratio of oxygen isotopes within it suggests that the temperatures on Earth 4.4 billion years ago would have supported liquid water, and therefore perhaps life. If that presumption is true then scientists may have just found another billion years that earth has been here which is an astonishing find.  Two isotopes of an element are considered different if they contain different numbers of neutrons.

“What we’ve learned is that the Earth cooled much more quickly that people had thought,” Valley said, “the surface formed a crust much more quickly than people thought.”