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A link between large mantle melting events and continent growth seen in osmium isotopes

Nature volume 449, pages 202–205 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Although Earth’s continental crust is thought to have been derived from the mantle, the timing and mode of crust formation have proven to be elusive issues. The area of preserved crust diminishes markedly with age1,2, and this can be interpreted as being the result of either the progressive accumulation of new crust3 or the tectonic recycling of old crust4. However, there is a disproportionate amount of crust of certain ages1,2, with the main peaks being 1.2, 1.9, 2.7 and 3.3 billion years old; this has led to a third model in which the crust has grown through time in pulses1,2,5,6,7, although peaks in continental crust ages could also record preferential preservation. The 187Re–187Os decay system is unique in its ability to track melt depletion events within the mantle and could therefore potentially link the crust and mantle differentiation records. Here we employ a laser ablation technique to analyse large numbers of osmium alloy grains to quantify the distribution of depletion ages in the Earth’s upper mantle. Statistical analysis of these data, combined with other samples of the upper mantle, show that depletion ages are not evenly distributed but cluster in distinct periods, around 1.2, 1.9 and 2.7 billion years. These mantle depletion events coincide with peaks in the generation of continental crust and so provide evidence of coupled, global and pulsed mantle–crust differentiation, lending strong support to pulsed models of continental growth by means of large-scale mantle melting events6.

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Figure 1: Continental crust zircon ages compared with ages recorded in mantle samples.
Figure 2: Assessment of whether age peaks are due to mantle heterogeneity.
Figure 3: Probability that the secondary age peaks (Fig. 1) match by random chance as the number of matching localities increases.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Nixon, the British Museum of Natural History, C. Francis of the Harvard Museum and the Tasmanian Geological Survey for the supply of PGAs used in this study, A. Brandon for making the paper more robust, L. Jaques for advice on sourcing PGAs, and M. Goldstein and K. Gallagher for guidance on statistical approaches.

Author Contributions All authors contributed equally to this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Northern Centre for Isotopic and Elemental Tracing, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 4QE, UK,

    D. G. Pearson, S. W. Parman & G. M. Nowell

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  1. D. G. Pearson
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  2. S. W. Parman
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  3. G. M. Nowell
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Correspondence to D. G. Pearson.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

The file contains Supplementary Figures 1-13 with Legends, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Tables 1-5. (PDF 403 kb)

Supplementary Data

The file contains Supplementary Data giving measured 187Os/188Os ratios and in-run precision together with Re depletion ages (calculated relative to the Ordinary Chondrite average – Ref 19, Main Text). (XLS 118 kb)

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Pearson, D., Parman, S. & Nowell, G. A link between large mantle melting events and continent growth seen in osmium isotopes. Nature 449, 202–205 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06122

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