Quartz, zircon, magnetite, gold are major constituents of littoral placers in Shandong province, while shell, ballstone, ilmenite, rutile being secondary.
The mineral assemplege of the deposit is composed of diaspore, kaolin, illite, chlorite, hematite, anatace and rutile with tourmaline, zircon, goyazite in less.
Moreover, in each part of the River, these Gangdese-derived zircons show characteristic eHf(T) values that could be correlated to the neighboring batholithic values.
Analyses of their constituent zircons could well provide valuable supporting evidence that Earth's continents owe their existence to bodies from outer space.
But the authors will also need to explain why zircons previously found at other, even older, sites do not display the same telltale signature of impact.
That speed showed that the samples were made of zircon, and zircon is one of the oldest known solids, meaning the moon must be the same age, 4.46 billion years old.
So despite earth's best efforts to hide its age from us, uranium-lead dating of little bits of zircon tells us our planet formed at least 4.4 billion years ago.
There's also other evidence from meteorites that suggests the earth is even older, but at bare minimum, this zircon lets us say with confidence that the earth is literally older
And one of the oldest terrestrial minerals ever found, quite possibly the oldest piece of the earth we know of, happens to be a very lead-filled grain of zircon found embedded in sandstone in Western Australia.
Which is weird, because lead isn't similar to zirconium, and so would never have ended up in a zircon crystal on its own, so the more lead you find in a zircon crystal, the older you know it is.