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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 ...

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 ...

Zircons studied by the research team, photographed using cathodoluminescence, a technique that allowed the team to visualize the interiors of the crystals using a specialized scanning electron ...

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 ...

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 ...

Cathodoluminescence image from a scanning electron microscope of a typical igneous zircon crystal from samples studied by the QUT research team, revealing growth rings of the zircon. Yellow circles ...

Scientists have confirmed that a tiny zircon crystal is the oldest piece of the Earth's crust, at 4.4 billion years old. The crystal was discovered on a sheep ranch in Perth, Australia in 2001, but ...