Creating Continents: Archean Cratons Tell the Story

Abstract

The record of the first two billion years of Earth’s history (the Archean) is notoriously incomplete, yet crust of this age is present on every continent. Here we examine the Archean record of the Wyoming craton in the northern Rocky Mountains, USA, which is both well-exposed and readily accessible. We identify three stages of Archean continental crust formation that are also recorded in other cratons. The youngest stage is characterized by a variety of Neoarchean rock assemblages that are indistinguishable from those produced by modern plate-tectonic processes. The middle stage is typified by the trondhjemite-tonalite-granodiorite (TTG) association, which involved partial melting of older, mafic crust. This older mafic crust is not preserved but can be inferred from information in igneous and detrital zircon grains and isotopic compositions of younger rocks in Wyoming and other cratons. This sequence of crust formation characterizes all cratons, but the times of transition from one stage to the next vary from craton to craton.