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In a recent episode, Nadja Drabon spoke about newly discovered zircon crystals that formed during the late Hadean and early Archean, when the Earth was between 500 million and a billion years old.\xa0 The zircons revealed information about processes occurring in the Earth\u2019s nascent crust, casting light on when and how modern-day plate tectonics may have started.\xa0 In this episode, we talk about a very different source of information about the early Earth, namely the abundances of noble gases occurring within present-day basalts.\xa0 It turns out that these can probe the Earth\u2019s mantle and atmosphere even further back in time \u2013 to the first 100 million years of Earth history.

Sujoy Mukhopadhyay leads a team of researchers who have developed new techniques for measuring the abundances of noble gas isotopes in a variety of Earth materials.\xa0 By combining the results of these measurements with geochemical models, he has shed light on questions about the very early Earth and planet formation that have challenged researchers for decades.\xa0 Here we focus on one of these: \u201cDo any structures originating from the very early Earth survive in today\u2019s mantle?\u201d Amazingly, the answer is "yes."

Sujoy Mukhopadhyay is Professor of Geochemistry at the University of California, Davis.

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