IT’S known as the Hadean eon, from the Greek word for hell. But the early Earth probably looked much as it does today.
A study of zircons, the oldest minerals on Earth, suggests that massive amounts of continental crust were formed soon after Earth’s creation 4.56 billion years ago.
Mark Harrison at the Australian National University in Canberra and his team looked at the ratio of hafnium isotopes, which change as a result of the radioactive decay of lutetium, to lutetium itself in 100 zircons dating back between 4 billion and 4.37 billion years. The minerals came from the Jack…
