Zircon mounting

Black, L. P., Williams, I. S. Compston, W. 1986. Four zircon ages from one rock the history of a 3930 Ma-old granulite from Mount Sones, Ender-by Land, Antarctica. Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, 94, 427-437. 

Kinny, P. D., Williams, I. S., Froude, D. O., Ireland, T. R. Compston, W. 1988. Early Archaean zircon ages from orthogneisses and anorthosites at Mount Narryer, Western Australia. Precambrian Research, 38, 325-341. 

Williams, I. S. Collins, W. J. 1990. Granite-greenstone terranes in the Pilbara Block, Australia, as coeval volcano-plutonic complexes evidence from U-Pb zircon dating of the Mount Edgar Batholith. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 97, 41-53. 

The oldest known terrestrial materials are 4.1-4.4Ga detrital zircons from the Mount Narryer area of western Australia (Froude et al., 1983). The first locality to be shown to host extremely ancient zircons (4.1-4.2Ga) was a sequence of highly metamorphosed quartzites, conglomerates, and pelites from Mount Narryer, at the northwestern edge of the Yilgarn Craton in western Australia. Subsequent discoveries, in a less metamorphosed sequence of sediments from the Jack Hills, some 60 km away identified even older zircons, some 4.28 Ga old (Compston Pidgeon, 1986). Recently, Wilde et al. (2001) reported a zircon grain with an age of 4.404 0.008 Ga (Fig. 1.10). To date this is the... 

However, in cases where spatial information is crucial, zircons (or other minerals) can also be analyzed in polished slab or thin sections of rock [21]. Separated zircons are mounted in epoxy and polished to expose the parts that will be targeted for dating. The targets for LA-ICP-MS analysis are generally selected based on cathodoluminescence imaging [22] (Figure 9.3). Prior to ablation, the sample is generally cleaned with nitric acid to remove any surface contamination, most notably Pb. 

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