Zircon U-Pb geochronology of the Chinese continental crust: a preliminary analysis of the Elsevier science database

ABSTRACTThe amount of zircon U-Pb geochronological data for China has grown rapidly in recent years. Nearly 410,000 items of zircon U-Pb geochronological data, representing more than 7,000 relevant articles in the Elsevier Science Database, have been collected to a database in this research. Statistics on the ages and absolute errors of these collated data, yielded smallest standard errors for (206Pb/238U), (207Pb/235U), and (207Pb/206Pb) ages within respective time intervals of 3282.52 Ma. The ages and their absolute errors were determined using three main geochronology methods, based on laser ablation inductively coupled mass spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS), sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP), and secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) measurements. We compared the influence of these different methods on errors for each age interval. In addition, using a Gaussian model of multi-peak fitting of zircon U-Pb age frequencies, we identified seven growth peaks i...