Nick M.W. Roberts

Abstract: The strong resilience of the mineral zircon and its ability to host a wealth of isotopic information make it the best deep-time archive of Earth's continental crust. Zircon is found in most felsic igneous rocks, can be precisely dated and can fingerprint magmatic sources; thus, it has been widely used to document the formation and evolution of continental crust, from pluton- to global-scale. Here, we present a review of major contributions that zircon studies have made in terms of understanding key questions involving the formation of the continents. These include the conditions of continent formation on early Earth, the onset of plate tectonics and subduction, the rate of crustal growth through time and the governing balance of continental addition v. continental loss, and the role of preservation bias in the zircon record. Supplementary material: A compilation used in this study of previously published detrital zircon U-Pb-Hf isotope data are available at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18791

TL;DR: In this article, the authors presented isotope dilution U-Pb isotope measurements on a sample of calcite (WC-1) that has been and will continue to be used as a reference material for in-situ LA-ICP-MS dating, and which is suitable to be distributed to the geochronological community.

TL;DR: The supercontinent cycle posits that the continental crust is periodically amalgamated into a single landmass, subsequently breaking up and dispersing into various continental fragments as mentioned in this paper, and the evolution of Earth's biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere is tied to the formation of continental crust and its subsequent movements on tectonic plates.

TL;DR: In this article, an application of in-situ laser ablation and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to basaltic fault rock geochronology in the Faroe Islands is presented.

TL;DR: The authors examined the source of leucogranite bodies in one of the world's youngest collisional orogens using novel zircon techniques that can resolve the presence of even minor mantle contributions.