Sedimentary rocks record surface environments throughout Earth’s history. However, alteration by diagenesis, weathering, and metamorphism often obscures the clues used to decipher that archive. Thus, older rocks become more challenging to interpret, leaving cryptic information about Earth’s earliest surface environments. Here, we show that detrital zircon grains preserve an unaltered record of paleo-transport history over billions of years. We systematically document microscopic features on zircon sand grains (‘microtextures’) from 3 modern, continental environments – aeolian, fluvial, and beach shore zone – revealing that microtextures can be used to diagnose transport environment. We validate this approach using an independent set of zircon grains from modern deposits to Paleoarchean rocks with independently known transport histories. Detrital zircons constitute an untapped account of our planet’s earliest surface environments, expanding the applicability of sand microtextural analyses to the first 90% of Earth’s history.
May 29, 2025 at 4:00:00 pm PDT