Kiwi world-famous in Greenland rewrote the textbooks

OPINION village of Atangmik, at the head of the remote Godthab Fjord up the west coast of Greenland. He so liked the place, he spent the rest of his life there.

While fossicking among rocks at the head of his fiord, Mcgregor made a discovery that rewrote the textbooks and still reverberates round the scientific world.

He discovered a distinctive greenstone rocky outcrop and, based on his fieldwork with ancient rocks in the Antarctic, reasoned that the Greenland rocks must be the oldest in the world. For years, and with single-minded persistence, Mcgregor tried to convince the world’s geologists about the ancient rocks, but his ideas were widely dismissed.

By chance he met scientists from a radio-dating lab at Oxford University, so sent them samples of his rocks. Using isotopic methods, Oxford scientists reckoned Mcgregor’s rocks were between 3.7 billion and 3.9 billion years old – the oldest rocks ever found on Earth. His rocks proved that the Earth developed its rocky crust ‘‘only’’ 700 million to 800 million years after its creation as a molten ball.

Mcgregor’s discovery drew crowds of the world’s geologists to his fiord to test his rocks from every angle. In 1996, a team of mainly American physicists discovered indirect isotopic evidence of ancient life in Mcgregor’s rocks, but their theorising has been open to question since.

Last year, some of Mcgregor’s rocks made international headlines again as they were found to contain fossils – microscopic cone-like structures built by blue-green bacteria and known as stromatolites. These are the first visible signs of life in the Earth’s rocks.

Because the early globe was bombarded by destructive asteroids that boiled our oceans into steam during its earliest – fittingly named Hadean – era, scientists thought that Earth was uninhabitable for a billion years after its creation. But the Greenland rocks prove otherwise. They show that photosynthetic life started relatively soon after the Earth formed.

Mcgregor married briefly, but had no children.

He set up, maintained and sometimes taught at a small school in his village, where the children taught him the difficult local language, and organised meetings of the Greenland home rule movement.

Mcgregor enjoyed hunting and playing ping-pong, becoming coach to the Greenland table tennis team. He rarely left his fiord except with the table tennis team or to attend international conferences.

In 2000, Vic Mcgregor killed himself in tragic circumstances, and was buried at his small village.

His schoolchildren wrote an ode to him. It’s several verses long, and begins:

Listen children to our story, that was written about an hour ago ...

About a man named Vic Mcgregor, from New Zealand down below,

To cold Greenland he did scurry, seeking rocks so very old ...