There is something deeply unsatisfying, even untidy, about a geoscientific history from which the first half billion years is more or less a blank. Every likely stone has been turned and every isotope hurled as a curve-ball through a mass spectrometer in the quest for either direct evidence of Hadean events or an acrid whiff that lingers in later matter. All, that is, except for one…
Formed in a proposed supernova that likely helped trigger formation of the Sun and Solar System, 150Gd quickly decayed to produce 146Sm, which itself had a half-life of about 68 Ma. That is too short for any significant trace of that radioactive rare-earth element to remain in terrestrial rocks, but its daughter isotope 142Nd bears witness to its former existence. Checking the proportion of 142Nd against the heavier 144Nd is a means of assessing isotopic fractionation according to atomic mass between a solid source of a magma, and between residual magma and solids that crystallised from it.
A popular and well-supported view of the Hadean is that shortly after accretion of the Earth a stupendous impact left a deep ‘ocean’ of magma and flung off mass that produced the Moon. Solidification of that ocean, which would have involved denser minerals sinking and lighter ones rising to higher levels, has been suggested to have resulted in differentiation of the mantle into two portions, one enriched, the other depleted; an event on which the entire later geochemical history of our planet has depended. Should either part of the mantle melt again, the igneous rocks that would result should carry a neodymium isotope signature of one or the other. Little sign of either emerges from studies of igneous rocks younger than 2.5 Ga, but older rocks from Greenland that go back to 3.8 Ga demonstrate that almost all of them melted from the Hadean depleted mantle. Without rocks carrying 142Nd/144Nd ratios signifying the other side of the more ancient mantle division, an enriched source, the grand idea was flawed. But this one-sidedness appears now to have been balanced by other Archaean igneous rocks (Rizo, H. et al. 2012. The elusive Hadean enriched reservoir revealed by 142Nd deficits in Isua Archaean rocks. Nature, v. 491, p. 96-100).
The analysed rocks are interesting for another reason, for they are 3.4 Ga old vertical sheets of basalt or dykes that cut through the more ancient west Greenland crust. They are the first evidence of a brittle crust that cracked under tension to be followed by mantle-derived magma. Some members of the Ameralik dyke swarm show just the isotopic signature predicted for the enriched member of the postulated fundamental mantle division. However, for some yet to be recognised reason, few post-Archaean rocks show any sign of widespread mantle heterogeneity. Such matters could be addressed with any confidence only after mass spectrometry allowed precise discrimination between isotopes of a whole variety of both common and rare elements. That was not so long ago, so a rich trove of future revelations can be anticipated.
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