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Early Earth

Closing the gap

The age of the oldest Jack Hills zircons — Earth's oldest minerals — is contentious. Atomic-scale mapping of the distribution of radiogenic isotopes within a Jack Hills zircon confirms that the oldest known continental crust formed just after the Earth–Moon system.

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Figure 1: Jack Hills zircon.

© JOHN VALLEY, UNIV. WISCONSIN

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Correspondence to Samuel Bowring.

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Bowring, S. Closing the gap. Nature Geosci 7, 169–170 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2100

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