It’s one of the most incredible finds in geology. In northern Canada, there’s an island chain called the Baffin Islands.  The most notable feature of those islands are their black basalt cliffs, made of super-hard magma rock.  Those cliffs, so easily visible to anyone passing by, have turned out to be a secretly important discovery:  they’re the oldest rock on earth, made from the original magma that created our planet.

The cliffs themselves are 60 million years old, but it’s where they come from that matters.  The mantle from which those cliffs spring is 4.5 billion years old.  They’re a virgin pocket of the original stuff that made Earth into a planet!  How amazing is that?  Well, let a scientist tell you.

“I was surprised that any of the (original) mantle survived,” said geoscientist Matthew Jackson of Boston University.  “Finding a piece of the original mantle has been a holy grail.  The original Earth was a big ball of magma.  That’s our (planet’s) original composition.”

Tags: Baffin Islands, lava basalt cliffs, Canada, oldest rock on earth, 60-million-year-old rocks, original material that made earth, earth’s crust material, Matthew Jackson, Boston University

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