Planned maintenance
A system upgrade is planned for 24/9-2024, at 12:00-14:00. During this time DiVA will be unavailable.
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Pb nanospheres in ancient zircon yield model ages for zircon formation and Pb mobilization
Swedish Museum of Natural History, Department of Geology. (Nordsim)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2227-577X
Show others and affiliations
2019 (English)In: Scientific Reports, E-ISSN 2045-2322, Vol. 9, no 1Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Nanospheres of lead (Pb) have recently been identified in zircon (ZrSiO4) with the potential to compromise the veracity of U-Pb age determinations. The key assumption that the determined age is robust against the effects of Pb mobility, as long as Pb is not lost from the zircon during subsequent geological events, is now in question. To determine the effect of nanosphere formation on age determination, and whether analysis of nanospheres can yield additional information about the timing of both zircon growth and nanosphere formation, zircons from the Napier Complex in Enderby Land, East Antarctica, were investigated by high-spatial resolution NanoSIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry) mapping. Conventional SIMS analyses with >µm resolution potentially mixes Pb from multiple nanospheres with the zircon host, yielding variable average values and therefore unreliable ages. NanoSIMS analyses were obtained of 207Pb/206Pb in nanospheres a few nanometres in diameter that were resolved from 207Pb/206Pb measurements in the zircon host. We demonstrate that analysis for 207Pb/206Pb in multiple individual Pb nanospheres, along with separate analysis of 207Pb/206Pb in the zircon host, can not only accurately yield the age of zircon crystallization, but also the time of nanosphere formation resulting from Pb mobilization during metamorphism. Model ages for both events can be derived that are correlated due to the limited range of possible solutions that can be satisfied by the measured 207Pb/206Pb ratios of nanospheres and zircon host. For the Napier Complex zircons, this yields a model age of ca 3110 Ma for zircon formation and a late Archean model age of 2610 Ma for the metamorphism that produced the nanospheres. The Nanosphere Model Age (NMA) method constrains both the crystallization age and age of the metamorphism to ~±135 Ma, a significant improvement on errors derived from counting statistics.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2019. Vol. 9, no 1
National Category
Geochemistry
Research subject
The changing Earth
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:nrm:diva-3579DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-49882-8OAI: oai:DiVA.org:nrm-3579DiVA, id: diva2:1375361
Available from: 2019-12-04 Created: 2019-12-04 Last updated: 2022-09-15Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(1344 kB)92 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 1344 kBChecksum SHA-512
befffca459fe5126b415f2a662d7e474c2c540644b76cc73f266a766b18b6583ee67129034e8af3dd734b4c0a224321f8fa6fc0ef54ee0997f7d5bb992d92811
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

Other links

Publisher's full texthttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49882-8

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Whitehouse, Martin J.
By organisation
Department of Geology
In the same journal
Scientific Reports
Geochemistry

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 92 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 39 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf