Oldest Immiscible Silica-rich Melt on the Moon Recorded in a ~4.38 Ga Zircon

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Abstract

The temporal duration of lunar-evolved magmatism is still poorly constrained. In lunar meteorite Northwest Africa (NWA) 10049, a melt inclusion-bearing zircon fragment provides a new tool to understand the composition and age of the melts from which zircon directly crystallized. The studied zircon-hosted melt inclusions are silica rich and iron poor (e.g., ~80–90 wt% SiO2; <0.5 wt% FeO), compositionally similar with immiscible silica-rich melts found in Apollo rocks. Nano-SIMS U–Pb analyses of the zircon yielded a minimum crystallization age of 4,382 ± 40 Ma, older than the ages for Apollo highly evolved alkali suite lithologies (~3.8–4.33 Ga). Our study shows that the melt inclusion-bearing zircon in NWA 10049 is the oldest microscale evidence for documenting immiscible silica-rich melts in lunar samples, suggesting that lunar-evolved silica-rich melts were prevalent as early as ~4.38 Ga. This work implies that there would be a prolonged silicic magmatism occurred on the Moon.

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Zeng, X., Joy, K. H., Li, S., Lin, Y., Wang, N., Li, X., … Wang, S. (2020). Oldest Immiscible Silica-rich Melt on the Moon Recorded in a ~4.38 Ga Zircon. Geophysical Research Letters, 47(4). https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085997

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