PRECISE AGE OF THE PLATINIFEROUS MERENSKY REEF, BUSHVELD COMPLEX, SOUTH AFRICA, BY THE U-Pb ZIRCON CHEMICAL ABRASION ID-TIMS TECHNIQUE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Bushveld Complex, South Africa, is the world’s largest layered intrusion and host to the majority of the known resources of platinum group elements, chromium, and vanadium. Despite intensive study, determining the precise crystallization age of the Bushveld Complex has proven to be difficult. In this study, zircon and rutile were identified in thin section and separated from a sample of pegmatitic feldspathic orthopyroxenite from the PGE-rich Merensky reef, West mine (Townlands shaft), Rustenburg section. Low U (21–105 ppm) zircon occurs with interstitial biotite and is locally in direct contact with sulfide. Rutile occurs mainly as inclusions within or overgrowths on chromite, especially in the chromitite stringers that bound the reef, and also as acicular grains with biotite. A U-Pb crystallization age of 2054.4 ± 1.3 Ma was determined from single-crystal chemical abrasion ID-TIMS U-Pb dating of zircon, and multigrain fractions of rutile yielded a U-Pb cooling age of 2055.0 ± 3.9 Ma. Integration of the Merensky reef crystallization age with existing U-Pb age determinations for intrusions that pre- and postdate emplacement and crystallization of the layered rocks of the Bushveld Complex indicate that magmatism occurred at ca. 2054 Ma and is contemporaneous with related magmatic activity across the northern Kaapvaal craton of South Africa and Botswana.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".