Sudbury Meteor

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by mick

I held a chunk of conglomerate rock which is a piece of the Sudbury Meteor, geologically carbon dated at 1.8 billion years ago.

Sorry, you're mistaken. The Carbon 14 dating limit lies around 60,000 years. Carbon 14 has a very short half life, and is normally used to date organic remains, wood, bones, teeth, etc., not rocks, like the remains of the Sudbury Meteor.

The Sudbury Meteor remains were probably dated using the Uranium-Lead, the Rubidium-Potassium, or the Potassium-Argon radioactive dating methods.

The meteorite that created the crater was an iron-nickel meteorite, which is why this area is one of the world's largest suppliers of nickel, and the reason why older Canadian nickels, pre-1958, are attracted to a magnet. Nickel was cheaper in Canada than in other parts of the world. These nickels have a higher percentage of nickel, one of three elements attracted to a magnet, the others being iron, and cobalt, than the nickels of the United States. As the cost of the metal nickel increased to a price such that a nickel was worth more than five cents, even Canada decreased the amount of nickel in their five cent coins, and modern Canadian nickels are no longer attracted to a magnet.