Building early Archean cratons from recycled Hadean crust

The formation of Earth's early crust and the geological processes leading to creation and preservation of stable Archean cratons are still poorly understood. Archean terrains are dominated by felsic Tonalite-Trondhjemite-Granodiorite (TTG) rocks. These felsic rocks however, cannot be directly produced from melting of the mantle but must instead be derived from the melting of an older mafic precursor. Despite growing evidence for a basaltic >4.3 Ga primordial crust on Earth, there are only a few occurrences of zircons older than 4.0 Ga; in the Jack Hills conglomerates and in the Acasta gneisses. Only after ~3.8 Ga does the zircon record become more prominent. The zircon age distribution in itself suggests a long quiescence period of over half a billion years before the mafic primitive crust was extensively recycled to produce a significant amount of felsic magma. The Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt (NGB) provides a glimpse at the nature of the mafic primitive crust. The mafic rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt (NGB), called the Ujaraaluk unit, have 146Sm-142Nd systematics consistent with them being formed in the Hadean, between 4.3 and 4.4 Ga. The NGB also comprises multiple generations of TTG ranging from 3.75 Ga to 3.35 Ga. Despite the fact that the mafic and felsic lithologies of the NGB show strong evidence of disturbance in the 147Sm-143Nd and 176Lu-177Hf long-lived isotopic systems, the NGB TTGs yield 142Nd and 182W anomalies that can be only generated in the Hadean. Moreover, zircons from the 3.35 to 3.65 TTGs have strongly subchondritic initial ɛHf values and display an ɛHf vs. age array consistent with their derivation from a Hadean mafic precursor. The NGB TTGs appear to have been formed primarily from melting of a source compositionally similar to the 4.4 Ga Ujaraaluk unit. The crustal history recorded in the NGB seems to be similar to the early crustal evolution recorded in the Jack Hills Hadean zircons where reworking of a >4.3 Ga enriched basaltic precursor produced TTG-type magmatism sustained for several hundred million years.