Researchers used zircons and AI to reconstruct Earth's ancient crust, revealing possible tectonic processes from the planet's ...

The ancient history of Earth has always been hard to read. Most of the planet’s earliest crust has been lost, buried, or melted by geologic processes over billions of years. The rare remnants that ...

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.

Scientists created a simulation showing that early Earth still retained chemical traces of its igneous youth, 4.5 billion years ago.

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

Some of them are an astounding 4.4 billion years old, so when geologists and other scientists got to study them, they were not disappointed. Many of the zircons are formed in such ...

Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, during the geological eon known as the Hadean. The name "Hadean" comes from the Greek god of the underworld, reflecting the extreme heat that likely ...

Scientists agreed the rocky outcrops in a remote part of Quebec, Canada, were ancient. But were they really Earth’s oldest? New research suggests they are.

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.

Samples from a new site place the rocks at approximately 4.16 billion years old, in the earliest period of Earth's history.