The climate of early Earth was no day at the beach, with stinging acid rains and an intensely warm surface, a new study suggests.
These harsh conditions could explain why geologists today have found no rocks more than 4 billion years old: They were all weathered away.
The fate of all those rocks from the first 500 million years after Earth formed has been a longstanding question in geology.
Geologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined zircon crystals, the oldest known materials on Earth, to shed light on the fate of rocks from the early Earth.