Uranium–lead zircon systematics in the Sudbury impact crater-fill: implications for target lithologies and crater evolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Sudbury impact structure is one of only a few terrestrial impact craters capable of providing insight into large impact processes. However, despite more than a century of study, no consensus exists regarding its depths of excavation and melting. This study presents 3920 U–Pb zircon dates for target lithologies and the crater-fill as well as new Pb-isotope data for target lithologies in an attempt to further constrain these depths and understand the behaviour of zircon in large impacts. Only 1.5% of the crater-fill zircons have dates within uncertainty of the 1.85 Ga impact event, with most seeming to preserve their pre-impact U–Pb systematics. The preponderance of undisturbed zircon in the crater-fill suggests that this mineral is an effective means of tracing target lithologies in impact basins. A significant fraction of crater-fill zircon was dated between 2.50 and 2.61 Ga, which is negligible amongst known target lithologies, and therefore identifies previously unrecognized target rocks. The Pb-isotope systematics are compatible with the proposal that the 2.6 Ga rock represents typical mid- to lower-crustal basement and could have been an important contributor to the melt-sheet. The combined data argue against a shallow melting scenario. With regard to Hadean terrestrial zircon, the lesson from Sudbury is that zircon can be recycled through multiple large impact events and still preserve the age of the original crust. Supplementary materials: Sample information, trace element and Pb-isotope data for granitoid and gneiss feldspar, Pb modelling parameters, U–Pb zircon data, concordia diagrams and airborne radiometric images are available at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18881 .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".