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Pictured here is Calvin Miller, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University, at the Kerlingarfjoll volcano in central Iceland. Some geologists have proposed that early Earth may have resembled regions like this. Conditions on Earth for the first 500 million years after it formed--a period called the Hadean--may have been surprisingly similar to present day, complete with oceans, continents and active crustal plates.
This theory has gained substantial support based on a study by Miller and a team of researchers in which they performed the first detailed comparison of zircon crystals that formed more than 4 billion years ago with those formed contemporaneously in Iceland.Image credit: Tamara Carley, Earth and Environmental Studies, Vanderbilt University
