Scientists recently unveiled the nation's newest "oldest known" rock — discovered in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin all feature ancient rocks known as gneisses — ...

The Acasta Gneiss is known as one of the oldest rocks on the Earth, estimated to be about 4 billion years old, located in the ...

The composition of Earth's crust depends on the style of plate tectonics and of the melting regimes in the mantle. Analyses of the oldest identified rocks suggest that these styles and the resulting ...

What we know today as Sabino Canyon was the site of a whole lot of scrunching 25 million years ago. In a geologic nutshell: Two ancient types of rock - 1.4-billion-year-old Oracle granite and ...

… but our independent journalism isn’t free to produce. Help us keep it this way with a tax-deductible donation today. Morton gneiss (pronounced “nice”), named for the town in Renville County where it ...

The people at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History were nice enough to give a couple members of the Chemistry in Pictures team a behind-the-scenes look at their mineral ...

After 40 minutes or so of skirting around enormous boulders, hurling myself up steep dirt trails, and staring slack-jawed at gigantic slabs of granite, I finally track down the echoing voices of two ...

Oldest North Cascades bedrock, a 400-million-year-old tale from European origins. The oldest bedrock in all of the North Cascades sits high in the mountains near the Canadian border. Its origin story ...