Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago

By S. Wilde, J. Valley, W. Peck, C. Graham. Nature, 2001

1,550 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Geophysics, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/176a500b0697fd2c5ca39fe1a3e8d8bfab391d66

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Citations in the corpus

The terrestrial biota prior to the origin of land plants (embryophytes): a review of the evidence (2015, background): “Zircons recovered from the Jack Hills conglomerate (Yilgarn Block) in Western Australia originally produced minimum radiometric ages of between 4.1 and 4.3 Ga (Compston and Pidgeon 1986), and these ages now extend to as old as 4.4 Ga (Wilde et al. 2001).”
Processes on the Young Earth and the Habitats of Early Life (2012, background): “The discovery of >4-Ga-old (>4-billion-year-old) zircons (Cavosie et al. 2005, 2007; Froude et al. 1983; Wilde et al. 2001) radically changed our interpretation of the first part of Earth’s history.”
On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. (2003, background): “What happened during those first 2.5 Gyr?”
Signature of life on exoplanets: Can Darwin produce false positive detections? (2002, background): “On the other hand, the absence of FeCO3 (siderite) 2.8 Gyr ago indicates PCO2 < 15 mbar (Rye et al. 1995).”
The Role of Atmospheric Aerosols in the Origin Of Life (2002, background): “It has been argued recently (Wilde et al., 2001; Mojzsis et al., 2001) that zircons in Western Australia could extend the ocean’s life back to 4.4 × 109 years ago, while isotopic carbon ratios in ancient sedimentary rocks in Greenland have been interpreted as indicating the presence of life ∼3.8 ×…”
Origins of building blocks of life: A review (2017, background): “As a consequence, a hydrosphere and continental crust were formed as early as 4.3 Gyr ago (Mojzsis et al., 2001; Wilde et al., 2001; Harrison et al., 2005).”
A molecular timeline for the origin of photosynthetic eukaryotes. (2004, methodology): “These results suggest that forcing the snowball Earth hypothesis onto our phylogeny results in underestimates of divergence times.”
Early life on land and the first terrestrial ecosystems (2013, background): “By contrast, the oldest materials on Earth (zircon crystals) go back ~4,400 Ma (Wilde et al. 2001), leaving a hiatus of ~170 Ma in Earth’s geological history.”
Origin and evolution of the atmospheres of early Venus, Earth and Mars (2018, background): “Particularly for the Earth, this hypothesis agrees with oxygen-isotope evidence from ancient zircons indicating the presence of liquid water on the Earth’s surface as early as 4.3-4.4 Gyr ago (Mojzsis et al. 2001; Wilde et al. 2001).”
How life began on Earth: a status report (2004, background): “4 Ga detrital zircons indicate that temperatures had apparently decreased to the point that liquid water was present on the Earth’s surface about 100–200 million years after accretion [18,19].”
Spectral Evolution of an Earth-like Planet (2006, background): “The oldest zircon crystals are as old as 4.4 Ga (Wilde et al. 2001) suggesting that liquid water formed even earlier than 4 Ga.”
The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt (2015, result): “Apart from the Os and Ru evidence, and model support that the LHB and the late veneer material were volatile-poor, there is evidence for oceans 4.4-4.3 Byr ago (Cavosie et al., 2005; Mojzsis et al., 2001; Wilde et al., 2001), i.e., 300-400 Myr before the LHB.”