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

Geologists have long debated whether a stony formation in Canada contains the world’s oldest rocks – new measurements make a ...

Rocks older than 4.03 billion years could shed light on Earth's earliest geological history, but they're incredibly rare.

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

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

In 2008 scientists reported that rocks in Canada were the world’s oldest. New data appear to confirm this contested claim ...

In 2008, researchers reported that these rocks dated back 4.3 billion years 2, a claim that other scientists contested. Work reported today in Science 1 seems to confirm that the rocks, known as the ...

Discover how scientists found and dated the oldest rocks on the planet, and why studying them can help explain how life on ...