Abstract
Constraining the growth and evolution of die continental crust provides insight into the secular change of tectono-magmatic processes dirough time. Radiogenic isotope pairs such as ~(176)Lu/~(176)Hf are commonly used to track the growth rates of the continental crust. Previous studies utilizing global compilations of Lu—Hf isotopes of zircon to query continental growth through time. However, we show that sample clustering and spatial bias lead to erroneous interpretations and casts doubt as to the representativeness of global zircon compilations. To I ameliorate this issue, we apply a geographic declustering algorithm to remove the spatial bias in the nonrep-resentative dataset. A more representative declustered dataset indicates that the continental crust grew much faster tiian previous assessments have proposed. We further speculate that the transition to modern-style tec-I tonics (as heralded by the appearance of low temperature-high pressure metamorphism) was accompanied by little to no net continental growth and propose tiiat continental growtii may be a feature of pre-plate tectonic magmatic processes.
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