Geology Department Postgraduate Web Pages
Name: Gavin Kenny
Contact Details
Tel: +353 (0)1 896 2675
Fax: +353 (0)1 6711199
Email: kennyg2@tcd.ie
Title of Project
Meteorite impact melt sheets as a potential source for Hadean zircon: employing the analagous 1.85 Ga Sudbury impact melt sheet.
Project details
This project intends to thorougly test the hypothesis that Hadean zircons could have been produced by post-impact, submarine volcanism on an otherwise uniformly mafic and stagnant protocrust. The 1.85 Ga Sudbury impact crater of Ontario, Canada, is being employed as an analogue for the long-destroyed Hadean craters.
The ‘cool early Earth’ model proposes the onset of plate tectonics and subduction-related arc magmatism as early as 4.4 Ga on the basis of the enrichment of many Hadean zircons in the 18O isotope (indicating low temperature interaction of the source magma with water) as well as inclusion populations, trace element compositions and zircon crystallisation temperatures. However, although suggested in the past, the full potential of very large meteorite impact craters as an alternative source for Hadean zircons with these characteristics has not been thoroughly tested. This model may prove simpler than that of very early plate tectonics as it is consistent with other lines of evidence indicating a long-lived Hadean protocrust, such as Lu-Hf isotope systematics of ancient zircon and 146Sm-142Nd and 235U-207U systematics of Palaeoarchean rocks.
Name of supervisor
Postgraduate personal details
In 2011 I graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, with a B.A. Mod in Geology. My undergraduate dissertation was the product of six weeks mapping of the geologically diverse island of Kerrera in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. In addition, I completed a laboratory-based project testing the relationship of pyrite formation in Carboniferous black mudstones to the underlying sub-economic, Irish-type, Zn-Pb deposit at Ballinalack, County Westmeath, Ireland. On graduating, I spent a year working in the mineral exploration industry in the Irish midlands before returning to Trinity College, Dublin, in September 2012 to begin my PhD.
Project Start Date
September 2012
Publications
Non-peer reviewed:
Kenny, G. 2011. A description of the Tapponier-Molnar model for major strike-slip extrusion of SE Asia during the late Cenozoic. The Undergraduate Journal of Ireland and Northern Ireland, 3, 38-48.
Funding
Irish Research Council EMBARK scholarship
