Grand Canyon Daniel Viñé Garcia/Getty

THE Grand Canyon in Arizona has a bizarre Antipodean link. A chunk of the rock sequence that has been sliced through to form this natural wonder of the world now sits thousands of kilometres away in Tasmania, Australia.

To peer into the Grand Canyon is to behold, in its rock layers, a record of Earth’s distant past. The oldest layers at the bottom date back more than 1.5 billion years.

It is some of the most ancient layers in the sequence that interest Jack Mulder, a geologist at Australia’s Monash University. He thinks these rocks …