How to Use zircon in a Sentence

zircon

noun

• Two minerals, zircon and monazite, held the key to the crater’s age.
  — Popular Science, 22 Jan. 2020
• The new finding confirms that the zircon comes from the island itself.
  — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 2 Feb. 2017
• Most of these zircon were brought back to the surface and eroded (a process called exhumation) in the last few million years.
  — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 20 Dec. 2022
• The zircon missile can travel nine times the speed of sound, according to intelligence on the new weapon.
  — Fox News, 28 May 2022
• Some zircon also record events where the magma heated back up (see below) for a brief periods of maybe decades to millennia.
  — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 4 Dec. 2014
• Minerals in the zircon show a time when Earth’s oceans, atmosphere and plate tectonics began.
  — Rachael Lallensack, Smithsonian, 7 June 2019
• About 5,000 minerals — crystalline substances such as quartz, zircon and diamond — have been found on Earth.
  — Quanta Magazine, 11 Aug. 2015
• The researchers recovered zircons as old as 3 billion years, Ashwal says in a press release.
  — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 2 Feb. 2017
• The researchers recovered zircons as old as 3 billion years, Ashwal says in a press release.
  — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 2 Feb. 2017
• The researchers collected samples of the mineral zircon, which can be used to calculate the age of rocks, from an island off the coast of Madagascar called Mauritius.
  — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, 2 Feb. 2017
• An analysis of zircon crystals more than 4 billion years old from the Jack Hills in Western Australia provided an early test.
  — Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 22 Apr. 2020
• Tiny igneous zircon grains within this rock fragment were fractured by the launch from Mars but otherwise unaltered for more than 4.4 billion years.
  — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 24 June 2019
• As zircon forms in cooling magma, its crystal structure contains uranium but no lead.
  — Scott Hershberger, Scientific American, 4 Aug. 2020
• The zircon carbide ends up providing the material with a stiffness even at high temperatures, while the tungsten is flexible enough to keep the whole thing from being brittle.
  — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 19 Oct. 2018
• To put a precise age on Yarrabubba crater, researchers analyzed minuscule features within tiny zircon and monazite minerals in rocks near the crater.
  — Erika K. Carlson, Discover Magazine, 21 Jan. 2020
• This suggests that rhyolite liquid is extracted from an old mush (bring the tiny zircon with it due to the high viscosity of the rhyolite), then new feldspar crystals grow before the rhyolite is erupted.
  — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 26 Aug. 2014
• Specifically, the multi-heavy mineral prospect consists of abrasives garne and epidote, and zircon, magnetite and gold.
  — Elwood Brehmer, Anchorage Daily News, 7 Nov. 2019
• On display is a 3.4 billion-year-old metaconglomerate rock with 4.4 billion-year-old zircon bits embedded inside it.
  — Rachael Lallensack, Smithsonian, 7 June 2019
• Pearce used a laser to vaporize the zircon, then analyzed its chemical composition.
  — Simon Akam, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2022
• Lunar zircon crystals are like cosmic timepieces that started ticking once that magma ocean cooled and solidified.
  — Carolyn Y. Johnson, Washington Post, 23 Oct. 2023
• Patterson’s approach analyzed the small amounts of uranium contained in the mineral zircon.
  — Steven Johnson, New York Times, 15 Mar. 2023
• As Laura Geggel reports for Live Science, the first of the dating techniques the researchers used measured uranium and thorium’s decay into helium to calculate the age of small zircon crystals retrieved from the site.
  — Meilan Solly, Smithsonian, 4 June 2019
• In 2013, a team of European and South African geologists published research showing that the island's rock actually contained zircon crystals that were billions of years older than the island itself.
  — Ken Jennings, Condé Nast Traveler, 6 Feb. 2017
• Uranium-lead zircon dating has superseded the much less accurate argon-argon dating, and margins of error that used to span millions of years now span thousands, greatly increasing the resolution of the data.
  — National Geographic, 18 Dec. 2019
• Scientists arrived at its true age after isolating certain minerals known as zircons.
  — Darren Orf, Popular Mechanics, 20 Nov. 2013
• Volcanoes often sprinkled ash here during the Triassic, and scientists can date that ash by counting uranium and lead atoms caged inside tiny, near-microscopic zircon crystals.
  — Douglas Fox, Discover Magazine, 2 Apr. 2015
• Enter Steven Benner’s latest theory of early earth’s wet–dry cycle, indicated by the presence of ancient mineral fragments called zircons.
  — Jill Kiedaisch, Popular Mechanics, 15 Jan. 2019
• After analyzing differences in the surrounding rock, the researchers divided things up into three distinct phases of zircon formation.
  — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 11 Aug. 2022
• Other scientists recently challenged that paper, saying the magnetic minerals inside the zircons could not be accurately dated.
  — Alexandra Witze, Scientific American, 12 Dec. 2019
• Traditional paleomagnetic measurements using superconducting sensors had found faint fields preserved in the zircons, a clue that Earth had a magnetic field half a billion years earlier than expected.
  — Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 22 Apr. 2020

Last Updated: 19 Sep 2024