WASHINGTON (Reuters) - To put it mildly, this is one gem of a gem. Scientists using two different age-determining techniques have shown that a tiny zircon crystal found on a sheep ranch in western ...

Australia’s iconic red landscapes have been home to Aboriginal culture and recorded in songlines for tens of thousands of ...

Morgan Cox does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

A sample of rough zircon crystal on a white marble background from Khibiny, Kola Peninsula, Russia. It is humbling to think that the history of our planet can be locked inside something so small. The ...

The Earth is really old - about 4 1/2 billion years old. And when scientists want to learn about its earliest history, they turn to a mineral that serves as an almost perfect geologic clock. As part ...

Anyone have extra birthday candles on hand? Because NASA’s about 40 million short. A new and in-depth atomic analysis of an Apollo-era Moon rock — a hunk of hardened magma and zircon crystal collected ...

A 4.4 billion-year-old zircon crystal is providing new insight into how the early Earth cooled from a ball of magma and formed continents just 160 million years after the formation of our solar system ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

Diamonds may be the hardest of gemstones, but it’s zircons that last forever. So durable are these birthstones of December that they represent Earth’s oldest known material: Some zircons from ...