Definition
The Jack Hills are located ~800 km north of Perth, Western Australia, within the Archean Narryer Terrane. They became internationally known as the site of the world’s oldest crystals (Compston and Pidgeon 1986; Wilde et al. 2001; Mojzsis et al. 2001).
Initial investigation at Mt. Narryer (~50 km southwest of Jack Hills) led to the discovery of a granulite-facies quartzite containing detrital zircons with an age ~4,150 Ma (Froude et al. 1983). Subsequent work on a greenschist facies conglomerate from Jack Hills (W74 site on Eranondoo Hill) led to the identification of two even older zircon grains with ages of 4,276 ± 12 Ma (Compston and Pidgeon 1986). A reinvestigation of zircons from that site identified one grain that recorded a 207Pb/206Pb age of 4,404 ± 8 Ma (Wilde et al. 2001), the oldest age obtained from terrestrial material.
Jack Hills’ zircons have continued to provide important information on the early Earth. This has included oxygen, lithium, and lutetium-hafnium...
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Bibliography
Compston, W., and Pidgeon, R. T., 1986. Jack Hills, evidence of more very old detrital zircons in Western Australia. Nature, 321, 766–769.
Froude, D. O., Ireland, T. R., Kinny, P. D., Williams, I. S., Compston, W., Williams, I. R., and Myers, J. S., 1983. Ion microprobe identification of 4100–4200 Myr-old terrestrial zircons. Nature, 304, 616–618.
Hopkins, M., Harrison, T. M., and Manning, C. E., 2008. Low heat flow inferred from >4 Gyr zircons suggests Hadean plate boundary interactions. Nature, 456, 493–496.
Kemp, A. I. S., Wilde, S. A., Hawkesworth, C. J., Coath, C. D., Nemchin, A., Pidgeon, R. T., Vervoort, J. D., and DuFrane, S. A., 2010. Hadean crustal evolution revisited: new constraints from Pb-Hf isotope systematics of the Jack Hills zircons. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 296, 45–56.
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 4300 Myr ago. Nature, 409, 178–181.
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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, 175–178.
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Wilde, S.A. (2014). Jack Hills Zircon. In: Rink, W., Thompson, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Scientific Dating Methods. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6326-5_95-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6326-5_95-2
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