Proterozoic to Phanerozoic case studies of laser ablation microanalysis for microbial carbonate U–Pb geochronology

Abstract

Some of the earliest bio-sedimentary records of life on Earth are represented by microbial carbonates, which are also critical geochemical archives of ancient seawater chemistry and the environmental circumstances in which they precipitated. Reconstructing paleo-microbial environments on Earth and potentially other planets requires precise determination of the depositional ages of these materials. The (abiogenic) carbonate geochemistry communities can now use developments in in-situ laser ablation U-Pb dating using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). Due to the effects of impurity mixing and diagenesis, microbial carbonates have received little geochronological study despite their broad relevance for understanding ancient seawater's environmental conditions and geochemical compositions. This study demonstrates using time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) to perform quick, quantitative elemental mapping before U-Pb spot dating to improve experiment success rates and data reliability and offers four practical application examples.

Keywords

Stromatolite / Microbial carbonate / Carbonate geochronology / In-situ LA-ICP-MS / ICP-Time Of Flight -MS / Trace element mapping

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yuxiang Jiang: Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Simon V. Hohl: Conceptualization, Validation, Investigation, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Xiangtong Huang: Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Resources, Writing – review & editing. Shouye Yang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Resources.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the team of ChemLab Shanghai for their support in LA-TOF-ICP-MS analyses and data processing, Sebastian Viehmann for sample contribution, and Guangyi Wei, Yi-Sheng Yin, and Zhongya Hu for assistance in the field. We thank the National Science Foundation of China for funding S.V. Hohl with a Research Fund for International Excellent Young Scientists (RFIS-II), the stromatolite geochemical archive (funding no. 42150610481). Finally, we thank Stijn Glorie for editorial handling and two anonymous reviewers for their critical input to earlier versions of this manuscript.

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