Vanishingly few traces of the early Earth are known, so when a new source of zircon crystals of Hadean age is discovered, it makes a big difference to what we can infer about that eon.  In the podcast, Nadja Drabon describes how she analyzed the new zircons she and her colleagues discovered and what they reveal about the Earth’s crust between about 4 and 3.6 billion years ago.
Nadja Drabon’s research aims to unravel the processes that formed the Earth’s earliest crust.  She does this by studying extremely ancient zircons.  These are few and far between, so the discovery of a new source of such zircons in the Barberton Greenstone Belt of South Africa was exciting to early Earth researchers.  In the podcast, she describes how she and her team used these zircons to discern a significant change in crustal processes about 3.8 billion years ago when much more fresh crust began to form.
Nadja Drabon is Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.
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