WASHINGTON, Sept 25, 2008 (AFP) - The oldest rocks on Earth have been discovered in Canada, offering scientists a glimpse at the origins of the planet, announced scientists in a study to be published Friday.

The rocks, found in a belt of ancient bedrock in Quebec, are estimated to be 4.28 billion years old.

WASHINGTON, Sept 25, 2008 (AFP) - The oldest rocks on Earth have been discovered in Canada, offering scientists a glimpse at the origins of the planet, announced scientists in a study to be published Friday.

The rocks, found in a belt of ancient bedrock in Quebec, are estimated to be 4.28 billion years old.

MADRID, July 24, 2008 (AFP) - The remains of several unknown insect species which became extinct long before dinosaurs stopped roaming the earth have been discovered in pieces of 110-million-year-old amber found in Spain, researchers said Thursday.

WASHINGTON, July 1, 2008 (AFP) - The devastating earthquake in China was the unexpected result of a seismological oddity and is likely to occur in the area only about once in every 2,000 to 10,000 years, US geoscientists said Monday.

BEIJING, May 22, 2008 (AFP) - Aftershocks, avalanches and flooding will likely cause more heavy losses in China's mountainous southwest following last week's devastating earthquake, a senior government official said Thursday.

PARIS, May 12, 2008 (AFP) - The violent quake that shook China's Sichuan province on Monday is linked to a shift of the Tibetan plateau to the north and east, specialists at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics told AFP.

'There will certainly be many aftershocks,' commented Paul Tapponnier, an expert on tectonics in the region that is prone to earthquakes.

WASHINGTON, March 7, 2008 (AFP) - A new dating technique has put the age of the Grand Canyon at 17 million years old, three times older than earlier estimates, according to a report in the latest edition of the journal Science.

PARIS, Feb 27, 2008 (AFP) - The monsoon rains that drench tropical and subtropical Asia from June through September vary in duration and intensity in keeping with tiny wobbles in Earth's orbit as it circles the Sun, according to a study released Wednesday.

PARIS, Feb 17, 2008 (AFP) - The Mississippi Delta is sinking fast, posing a challenge for the rebuilding of coastal Louisiana after the devastation wrought in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, a study released Sunday confirmed.

LONDON, Sept 22, 2007 (AFP) - Britain is seeking to legally annex stretches of the south Atlantic seabed in a bid to tap gas, mineral and oil wealth, in a move that could raise tension with Argentina, a newspaper reported Saturday.

It plans to file with the United Nations authorities a claim to tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall, The Guardian said.

PARIS, Aug 15, 2007 (AFP) - The same powdery mineral used to dust baby bottoms may be what keeps the capricious San Andreas fault in California from unleashing more major quakes, according to a study released Tuesday.

The most active and probably the most studied fault it the world, the 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) San Andreas has long puzzled geologists.

Its northern and southern sections, which tend to 'stick and slip,' are prone to occasional but violent quakes, such as the one that killed some 3,000 people in 1906 and reduced much of San Francisco to ashes.