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 ...

While studying diamonds inside an ancient meteorite, scientists have found a strange, interwoven microscopic structure that has ... of Central America Ancient zircon crystals shed light on 1 ...

The zircon crystal comes into being deep inside a young ... a clear, millimetre-sized structure so hard that it will last for all of eternity – at least as far as Earth is concerned.

When zircon forms, crystallising out of cooling magma or in hot, high-pressure rocks, its rigid cubic crystal structure traps atoms of a particular kind of uranium, uranium-238. Just a few ...

Zircon's crystal structure has specific sites where only atoms of a given size and charge will fit. These locations concentrate uranium atoms and exclude lead, so the only lead found at these ...

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Ackerson says a zircon crystal originally forms in magma - hot molten rock. Other minerals do too. Together, they'll make up, say, a granite mountain that slowly weathers away.

For me, it is the crystals in volcanic rocks that hold the key to understanding the evolution of magma at volcanoes -- they record events in crystalline structure ... of a zircon crystal (see ...

A zircon crystal blasted off the face of Mars before ... in the hope they would indicate how such an exceptional structure could be made. They found them in Australia’s Olympic Dam, the largest ...

Zircon also has tiny amounts of the radioactive element uranium in its crystal structure, which decays over a long period of time and changes into lead, Prave noted. Researchers can measure this ...

The zircon we studied is 4.45 billion years old. Within it, iron, aluminum and sodium are preserved in abundance patterns like concentric layers, similar to an onion.