Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, during the geological eon known as the Hadean. The name "Hadean" comes from the ...

Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, during the geological eon known as the Hadean. The name "Hadean" comes from the ...

The oldest terrestrial materials ever dated by scientists are extremely rare zircon minerals that were discovered in western ...

Our planet has been asteroid-smashed, melted and eroded, enough that most of its original armor has been long buried. Except for one small chunk.

Any samarium in the rocks was long gone. However, samarium isotopes had left behind chemical signatures of their decay into isotopes of neodymium.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – The city of Albuquerque and Isotopes Park were in the national spotlight on Wednesday afternoon. ESPN hosted an episode of SportsCenter live inside the stadium during ...

The new research compared two ratios of these isotopes: the long-lived samarium-147 to neodymium-143 and the shorter-lived samarium-146 to neodymium-142.

In their 2008 work, O’Neil and his colleagues analysed the chemical imprint left by the radioactive decay of the isotope samarium-146 into neodymium-142 to calculate that the Nuvvuagittuq rocks ...

Samarium can decay into neodymium through two pathways (samarium ... it is especially susceptible to tectonic events muddling its isotopes part way through the decay process. "Any 'cooking' of the ...

If the new age of these Canadian rocks is solid, they would be the first and only ones known to have survived Earth’s earliest, tumultuous time.