GRENVILLE ZIRCON FERTILITY AND BABY BOOM; NATURAL BIAS IN THE APPALACHIAN DETRITAL ZIRCON RECORD

Grenville-aged (~1150-1050 Ma) granitoids of eastern Laurentia exposed in Appalachian basement massifs are as much as 20 times more Zr-rich and much more fertile for crystallizing zircon compared to Paleozoic Laurentian granitoids of the E. Blue Ridge, Inner Piedmont, and Carolina terranes. Erosion of Grenville source rocks generates disproportionately large numbers and/or sizes of detrital zircon compared to less fertile magmatic sources. The latter are essentially undetectable by standard detrital zircon provenance methods (SHRIMP or LA-ICP-MS analysis of magmatic cores of > 100 µm grains). Grenvillian zircon fertility biased the Neoproterozoic to Recent detrital record as a result of: (1) zircon durability and insolubility in aqueous fluids means detrital zircons eroded from Grenville basement terranes are recycled during repeated orogenesis; (2) inertness of zircon below upper amphibolite facies (onset of anatexis), and high Zr resulting from concentration of detrital zircon in sedimentary protoliths, means dominantly metasedimentary terranes will fail to generate sufficient new zircon corresponding in age to the time of accretion of those terranes to Laurentia. Zircon growth under incipient anatectic conditions generates new zircon as overgrowths on detrital magmatic cores; overgrowths are often too thin to analyze by ion or laser beam. In this case, metasedimentary terranes may be rendered essentially undetectable. New ‘magmatic' zircon may be generated with greater degrees of anatexis, but might be inferred to be of plutonic, not metamorphic, parentage. Grenville modes dominate detrital zircon age distributions for: Laurentian Neoproterozoic rift basins; Neoproterozoic to Lower Ordovician passive margin sequences; Appalachian Paleozoic syn-orogenic clastic sequences; Appalachian metasedimentary terranes; and modern rivers. The latter is surprising since Grenville terranes comprise <15% of exposed crust in the S. Appalachians, and were not exposed during Paleozoic orogenesis. The dominance is primarily an artifact of the Grenville zircon ‘baby boom' that echoed through later orogenies. The natural bias in the detrital zircon record resulting from zircon behavior further compounds bias related to sampling and analysis, which tends to involve cores of large grains (100-300 µm).