Vestiges of Earth’s earliest depleted mantle reservoir

There is a paucity of evidence preserved in the rock record regarding Earth’s earliest enriched crust and its complementary depleted mantle during the Hadean. In recent years, vestiges of these early reservoirs have been inferred by examination of Hf isotope systematics compiled from zircons. The Singhbhum craton of Eastern India, for example, preserves only the existence of an enriched (εHf <0) crustal reservoir during the Hadean−Eoarchean, with the notable absence of a depleted mantle reservoir signature (εHf >0) until ca. 3.5 Ga. Here we report a new Sm-Nd isochron for the Lower Lava greenstones of the western Iron Ore Group from the Singhbhum craton, confirming a 3.42 ± 0.14 Ga crystallization age with an initial εNd of +5.7 ± 2.5. This is the highest positive εNd value derived from an isochron of this age. We infer that this depleted mantle source is a vestige complementary to the primary crust following planetary differentiation. Furthermore, we present U-Pb zircon ages for a 3.39 ± 0.02 Ga tuff that lies stratigraphically above the Lower Lava and <30 cm below an extensive conformable banded iron formation (BIF). This age implies that the western Iron Ore Group’s BIF is the largest economic-grade iron formation of its Paleoarchean age, suggesting that free atmospheric oxygen existed as more than just whiffs at this time.