Older than life on Earth

A reservoir of rock that remained intact for nearly the entire history of Earth could tell us about how our planet was built. Its chemistry hints that Earth's building blocks may have had a rough time of it, losing their skins before they could unite.

The rocks were thrown up by volcanoes in the Arctic wastes of Baffin Island and Greenland only 62 million years ago, but it seems they came from a store of rock in the mantle that formed 4.5 billion years ago – just after Earth formed.

-- report