Researchers: Earth Quite Younger than First Thought

Mother Earth has reason to be happy. She's apparently 70 million years younger than we all thought.

Scientists had believed that the Earth was 4.537 billion-years-old. But a new study by an international team of researchers suggests that the planet's age is actually closer to 4.467 billion-years-old. The new mathematical models they came up with was based on a comparison of geochemical information taken from the Earth's mantle with meteorites containing similar materials.

"The whole issue hinges on working out how long it took for the core of the Earth to form, which is one of the big unknowns in this area of science," co-author Dr. John Rudge, from the University of Cambridge, said. "One of the problems has been that scientists usually presume Earth's accretion happened at an exponentially decreasing rate. We believe that the process may not have been that simple and that it could well have been a much more staggered, stop-start affair."

Their findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience,