In this episode of Backyard Geology, Serena takes you to the Jack Hills in western Australia to peer 4.39 billion years into the past. Detrital zircon grains found in the rocks of the Jack Hills are the oldest known materials existing on Earth today. Their chemical makeup preserves Earth’s oldest and most elusive Eon, the Hadean. Tune in to travel back billions of years with micrometers of minerals!
Cover art photo credits: Chris Spencer
Resources:
Compston, W. and Pidgeon, R.T., 1986. Jack Hills, evidence of more very old detrital zircons in Western Australia. Nature, 321(6072), pp.766–769. https://doi.org/10.1038/321766a0.
Harrison, T.M., 2020. Hadean Jack Hills Zircon Geochemistry. In: T.M. Harrison, ed. Hadean Earth. [online] Cham: Springer International Publishing.pp.143–178. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46687-9_7.
Mojzsis, S.J., Harrison, T.M. and Pidgeon, R.T., 2001. Oxygen-isotope evidence from ancient zircons for liquid water at the Earth’s surface 4,300 Myr ago. Nature, 409(6817), pp.178–181. https://doi.org/10.1038/35051557.
Turner, S., Wilde, S., Wörner, G., Schaefer, B. and Lai, Y.-J., 2020. An andesitic source for Jack Hills zircon supports onset of plate tectonics in the Hadean. Nature Communications, 11(1), p.1241. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14857-1.
Wilde, S.A., Valley, J.W., Peck, W.H. and Graham, C.M., 2001. Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago. Nature, 409(6817), pp.175–178. https://doi.org/10.1038/35051550.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.