The oldest rock on Earth

The paper « No evidence for Hadean continental crust within Earth’s oldest evolved rock unit » of Reimink et al. in Nature Geoscience presents the first high-precision U-Pb date of a Hadean (>4.0 Ga old) zircon in the Acasta Gneisses of NW Canada. The authors provide evidence that the earliest rocks on Earth were formed by fractional crystallization from a basaltic melt in a pre-plate tectonic context.

Contact :

For more information, please contact Professor Urs Schaltegger (Tel. +41 22 379 66 39).

Reference :

No evidence for Hadean continental crust within Earth’s oldest evolved rock unit, J.R. Reimink, J.H.F.L. Davies, T. Chacko, R.A. Stern, L.M. Heaman, C. Sarkar, U. Schaltegger, R.A. Creaser, D.G. Pearson, Nature Geoscience – Published in Advance Sep 19, 2016. DOI