Inherited, enriched, heated, or recycled? Examining potential causes of Earth's most zircon fertile magmatic episode

Because Grenville magmas had such high Zr contents they produced intermediate-felsic plutons with a much higher zircon content compared to typical granitoids. This resulted in a disproportionate amount of ~ 1 Ga detrital zircon in the sedimentary record. This superabundance of detrital grains can cause biases in provenance studies and crustal growth models that use the magnitude of detrital zircon age modes as a proxy for source contribution or amount of new crustal material generated.