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Early Earth

Closing the gap

Nature Geoscience volume 7, pages 169–170 (2014)Cite this article

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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.

Our understanding of Earth's early evolutionary timeline is mostly inferred from geochemical data from meteorites and the oldest preserved crust. The first megascopic objects in the Solar System formed about 4.567 billion years ago1. However, the Earth–Moon system — probably created during a giant impact — is far younger, and dates back to between about 4.5 and 4.4 billion years ago2,3. The oldest preserved crust was previously thought to have formed around 3.8 billion years ago, 600 million years after the Earth–Moon system formed4, but over the past few decades older remnants of crust have been identified, both in outcrop and as grains of the mineral zircon5,6,7,8. However, the accuracy of the oldest zircon dates has been called into question4,9,10,11. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Valley et al.12 use high-spatial-resolution analytical methods to confirm the antiquity of the oldest known remnant of Earth's continental crust, a single grain of zircon, at 4.374 ± 0.006 billion years — closing the gap in time between the Moon-forming impact and the creation of Earth's first continental crust.

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Figure 1: Jack Hills zircon.

© JOHN VALLEY, UNIV. WISCONSIN

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  1. Samuel Bowring is in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA,

    Samuel Bowring

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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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