The Narryer Gneiss Terrane is a geological complex in Western Australia

Western Australia

Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...

 that is composed of a tectonically interleaved and polydeformed mixture of granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

, mafic

Mafic

Mafic is an adjective describing a silicate mineral or rock that is rich in magnesium and iron; the term is a portmanteau of the words "magnesium" and "ferric". Most mafic minerals are dark in color and the relative density is greater than 3. Common rock-forming mafic minerals include olivine,...

 intrusion

Intrusion

An intrusion is liquid rock that forms under Earth's surface. Magma from under the surface is slowly pushed up from deep within the earth into any cracks or spaces it can find, sometimes pushing existing country rock out of the way, a process that can take millions of years. As the rock slowly...

s and metasediment

Metasediment

In geology, metasediment is sediment or sedimentary rock that shows evidence of having been subjected to metamorphism. The overall composition of a metasediment can be used to identify the original sedimentary rock, even where they have been subject to high-grade metamorphism and intense...

ary rocks in excess of 3.3 billion years old, with the majority of the Narryer Gneiss Terrane in excess of 3.6 billion years old. The rocks have experienced multiple metamorphic events at amphibolite

Amphibolite

Amphibolite is the name given to a rock consisting mainly of hornblende amphibole, the use of the term being restricted, however, to metamorphic rocks. The modern terminology for a holocrystalline plutonic igneous rocks composed primarily of hornblende amphibole is a hornblendite, which are...

 or granulite

Granulite

Granulites are medium to coarse–grained metamorphic rocks that have experienced high temperature metamorphism, composed mainly of feldspars sometimes associated with quartz and anhydrous ferromagnesian minerals, with granoblastic texture and gneissose to massive structure...

 conditions, resulting in often complete destruction of original igneous or sedimentary (protolith

Protolith

Protolith refers to the precursor lithology of a metamorphic rock.For example, the protolith of a slate is a shale or mudstone. Metamorphic rocks can be derived from any other rock and thus have a wide variety of protoliths. Identifying a protolith is a major aim of metamorphic geology.Sedimentary...

) textures

Texture (geology)

Texture in geology refers to the physical appearance or character of a rock, such as grain size, shape, arrangement, and pattern at both the megascopic or microscopic surface feature level. This includes the geometric aspects and relations amongst the component particles or crystals which is called...

. Importantly, it contains the oldest known samples of the Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

's crust

Crust (geology)

In geology, the crust is the outermost solid shell of a rocky planet or natural satellite, which is chemically distinct from the underlying mantle...

: samples of zircon

Zircon

Zircon is a mineral belonging to the group of nesosilicates. Its chemical name is zirconium silicate and its corresponding chemical formula is ZrSiO4. A common empirical formula showing some of the range of substitution in zircon is 1–x4x–y...

 from the Jack Hills

Jack Hills

The Jack Hills are a range of hills in Mid West Western Australia. They are best known as the source of the oldest material of terrestrial origin found to date: zircons that formed around 4.4 billion years ago...

 portion of the Narryer Gneiss have been radiometrically dated at 4.4 billion years old, although the majority of zircon crystal

Crystal

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions. The scientific study of crystals and crystal formation is known as crystallography...

s are about 3.6-3.8 billion years old.

The Narryer Gneiss Terrane is adjacent to the northernmost margin of the Yilgarn Craton

Yilgarn craton

The Yilgarn Craton is a large craton which constitutes the bulk of the Western Australian land mass. It is bounded by a mixture of sedimentary basins and Proterozoic fold and thrust belts...

 and is abutted on the north by the Gascoyne Complex

Gascoyne Complex

The Gascoyne Complex is a terrane of Proterozoic granite and metamorphic rock in the central-western part of Western Australia. The complex outcrops at the exposed western end of the Capricorn Orogen, a 1,000 km-long arcuate belt of folded, faulted and metamorphosed rocks between two Archean...

 metasedimentary and metagranite orogen. The Narryer Gneiss Terrane also includes parts of the Yarlarweelor Gneiss which abuts to Nabberu Basin metamorphic sequences of the Bryah-Padbury Basins, where it is present as discontinuous slivers of metamorphic rock

Metamorphic rock

Metamorphic rock is the transformation of an existing rock type, the protolith, in a process called metamorphism, which means "change in form". The protolith is subjected to heat and pressure causing profound physical and/or chemical change...

s, pelite

Pelite

Pelite is old and currently not widely used field terminology for a clayey fine-grained clastic sediment or sedimentary rock, i.e. mud or mudstone. It is equivalent to the Latin-derived term lutite. More commonly, metamorphic geologists currently use pelite for a metamorphosed fine-grained...

s, metaconglomerate

Metaconglomerate

Metaconglomerate is a rock type which originated from conglomerate after undergoing metamorphism. Conglomerate is easily identifiable by the pebbles or larger clasts in a matrix of sand, silt, or clay. Metaconglomerate looks similar to conglomerate, although sometimes the clasts are deformed...

s and gneiss

Gneiss

Gneiss is a common and widely distributed type of rock formed by high-grade regional metamorphic processes from pre-existing formations that were originally either igneous or sedimentary rocks.-Etymology:...

es caught up within regional strike-slip oblique thrust fault

Thrust fault

A thrust fault is a type of fault, or break in the Earth's crust across which there has been relative movement, in which rocks of lower stratigraphic position are pushed up and over higher strata. They are often recognized because they place older rocks above younger...

s.

The Narryer Gneiss in this far-eastern region may form the basement to the 2.0-1.8 billion year old Proterozoic

Proterozoic

The Proterozoic is a geological eon representing a period before the first abundant complex life on Earth. The name Proterozoic comes from the Greek "earlier life"...

 rocks, and the unconformity

Unconformity

An unconformity is a buried erosion surface separating two rock masses or strata of different ages, indicating that sediment deposition was not continuous. In general, the older layer was exposed to erosion for an interval of time before deposition of the younger, but the term is used to describe...

 surface may be preserved within the thrust sheets.

The Narryer Gneiss Terrane is divided into four major rock sequences (Myers 1990); the Dugel Gneiss, Meeberrie Gneiss, Manfred Complex, and unassigned polydeformed leucocratic gneisses and metasediments.

Dugel Gneiss

The Dugel Gneiss is syenogranitic or monzogranitic in composition and this is interpreted as the protolith. The gneiss is leucocratic, with only minor amounts of biotite

Biotite

Biotite is a common phyllosilicate mineral within the mica group, with the approximate chemical formula . More generally, it refers to the dark mica series, primarily a solid-solution series between the iron-endmember annite, and the magnesium-endmember phlogopite; more aluminous endmembers...

 and muscovite

Muscovite

Muscovite is a phyllosilicate mineral of aluminium and potassium with formula KAl22, or 236. It has a highly-perfect basal cleavage yielding remarkably-thin laminæ which are often highly elastic...

. The rock exhibits variable intensity of metamorphic banding which may include grain size variations, and has a high degree of deformation around the margins, and preserves an amphibolite facies metamorphic assemblage. The gneiss is pervasively shot through with pegmatite

Pegmatite

A pegmatite is a very crystalline, intrusive igneous rock composed of interlocking crystals usually larger than 2.5 cm in size; such rocks are referred to as pegmatitic....

 veins.

Within the low-strain zones, the Dugel Gneiss exists as a medium-grained leucocratic metagranite with phenocryst

Phenocryst

thumb|right|300px|[[Granite]]s often have large [[feldspar|feldspatic]] phenocrysts. This granite, from the [[Switzerland|Swiss]] side of the [[Mont Blanc]] massif, has large white [[plagioclase]] phenocrysts, [[triclinic]] [[mineral]]s that give [[trapezium|trapezoid]] shapes when cut through)...

s of K-feldspar which has recrystallized into granulite facies. The rock is greasy-looking with anneal

Annealing (metallurgy)

Annealing, in metallurgy and materials science, is a heat treatment wherein a material is altered, causing changes in its properties such as strength and hardness. It is a process that produces conditions by heating to above the recrystallization temperature, maintaining a suitable temperature, and...

ed quartz

Quartz

Quartz is the second-most-abundant mineral in the Earth's continental crust, after feldspar. It is made up of a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall formula SiO2. There are many different varieties of quartz,...

 and feldspar

Feldspar

Feldspars are a group of rock-forming tectosilicate minerals which make up as much as 60% of the Earth's crust....

, and syn-granulite facies leucosomes

Migmatite

Migmatite is a rock at the frontier between igneous and metamorphic rocks. They can also be known as diatexite.Migmatites form under extreme temperature conditions during prograde metamorphism, where partial melting occurs in pre-existing rocks. Migmatites are not crystallized from a totally...

 cutting across metamorphic banding, and subsequently deformed by later metamorphism

Metamorphism

Metamorphism is the solid-state recrystallization of pre-existing rocks due to changes in physical and chemical conditions, primarily heat, pressure, and the introduction of chemically active fluids. Mineralogical, chemical and crystallographic changes can occur during this process...

.

The Dugel Gneiss is considered to be intruded into the older Meeberrie Gneiss, possibly as sheets or sill

Sill (geology)

In geology, a sill is a tabular sheet intrusion that has intruded between older layers of sedimentary rock, beds of volcanic lava or tuff, or even along the direction of foliation in metamorphic rock. The term sill is synonymous with concordant intrusive sheet...

s, but most contacts are overprinted by ductile metamorphic banding or mylonite

Mylonite

Mylonite is a fine-grained, compact rock produced by dynamic recrystallization of the constituent minerals resulting in a reduction of the grain size of the rock. It is classified as a metamorphic rock...

 zones.

Meeberrie Gneiss

The Meeberrie Gneiss is a generally ductilely deformed banded gneiss of monzogranitic composition, and its protolith is interpreted as a set of monzogranite sills or lopolithic intrusions.

The gneiss is heavily banded by layers of amphibolite-K-feldspar-quartz of varying grainsize, plus networks of pegmatite veins. Most is strongly deformed, but least-deformed areas show a relict porphyritic

Rock microstructure

Rock microstructure includes the texture of a rock and the small scale rock structures. The words "texture" and "microstructure" are interchangeable, with the latter preferred in modern geological literature...

 to equigranular texture.

Manfred Complex

The Manfred Complex is a heavily attenuated and discontinuous series of ultramafic to mafic cumulates contained within a matrix or wall-rocks of mixed Dugel and Meeberrie Gneisses. The rock types are primarily pyroxene

Pyroxene

The pyroxenes are a group of important rock-forming inosilicate minerals found in many igneous and metamorphic rocks. They share a common structure consisting of single chains of silica tetrahedra and they crystallize in the monoclinic and orthorhombic systems...

 gabbro

Gabbro

Gabbro refers to a large group of dark, coarse-grained, intrusive mafic igneous rocks chemically equivalent to basalt. The rocks are plutonic, formed when molten magma is trapped beneath the Earth's surface and cools into a crystalline mass....

 to amphibolite, with rare serpentinised

Serpentinite

Serpentinite is a rock composed of one or more serpentine group minerals. Minerals in this group are formed by serpentinization, a hydration and metamorphic transformation of ultramafic rock from the Earth's mantle...

 peridotite

Peridotite

A peridotite is a dense, coarse-grained igneous rock, consisting mostly of the minerals olivine and pyroxene. Peridotite is ultramafic, as the rock contains less than 45% silica. It is high in magnesium, reflecting the high proportions of magnesium-rich olivine, with appreciable iron...

 and dunite

Dunite

Dunite is an igneous, plutonic rock, of ultramafic composition, with coarse-grained or phaneritic texture. The mineral assemblage is greater than 90% olivine, with minor amounts of other minerals such as pyroxene, chromite and pyrope. Dunite is the olivine-rich end-member of the peridotite group...

, occasionally containing relict igneous or metamorphic olivine

Olivine

The mineral olivine is a magnesium iron silicate with the formula 2SiO4. It is a common mineral in the Earth's subsurface but weathers quickly on the surface....

.

These boudins

Boudinage

thumb|Boudinaged quartz vein in shear foliation, Starlight Pit, Fortnum Gold Mine, Western Australia.Boudinage is a geological term for structures formed by extension, where a rigid tabular body such as a bed of sandstone, is stretched and deformed amidst less competent surroundings...

 of material range from centimetre-scale to ~100m thick and one kilometre long and, based on their position within anticline

Anticline

In structural geology, an anticline is a fold that is convex up and has its oldest beds at its core. The term is not to be confused with antiform, which is a purely descriptive term for any fold that is convex up. Therefore if age relationships In structural geology, an anticline is a fold that is...

s and syncline

Syncline

In structural geology, a syncline is a fold, with younger layers closer to the center of the structure. A synclinorium is a large syncline with superimposed smaller folds. Synclines are typically a downward fold, termed a synformal syncline In structural geology, a syncline is a fold, with younger...

s in the Mount Narryer area, are interpreted to have intruded subparallel to bedding and are now strung out by shearing

Shearing (physics)

Shearing in continuum mechanics refers to the occurrence of a shear strain, which is a deformation of a material substance in which parallel internal surfaces slide past one another. It is induced by a shear stress in the material...

.

The Manfred Complex is interpreted to represent an early Archaean mafic to ultramafic layered intrusion which has been disaggregated. This disaggregation is partly tectonic, but in some areas evidence suggests that this was mostly achieved by the intrusion of the Dugel and Meeberrie gneisses as sills or sheets.

Geochronology

Geochronology

Geochronology is the science of determining the age of rocks, fossils, and sediments, within a certain degree of uncertainty inherent to the method used. A variety of dating methods are used by geologists to achieve this, and schemes of classification and terminology have been proposed...

 on the Manfred Complex places its age at around 3.73 billion via Pb

Lead

Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...

-Pb on zircon. This makes it the oldest recognised intrusive rock on the Earth, containing the oldest known igneous textures and mineral assemblages.

Metasedimentary rocks

Metasedimentary rocks from within the Narryer Gneiss terrane account for about 10% of the outcrop and are variably deformed but uniformly of at least amphibolite grade metamorpism.

The most abundant rock types are quartzite

Quartzite

Quartzite is a hard metamorphic rock which was originally sandstone. Sandstone is converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tectonic compression within orogenic belts. Pure quartzite is usually white to gray, though quartzites often occur in various shades of pink...

 and banded iron

Iron

Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...

 formation, with subordinate metamorphic gneisses, metaconglomerates and pelitic to semi-pelitic quartz-muscovite schist

Schist

The schists constitute a group of medium-grade metamorphic rocks, chiefly notable for the preponderance of lamellar minerals such as micas, chlorite, talc, hornblende, graphite, and others. Quartz often occurs in drawn-out grains to such an extent that a particular form called quartz schist is...

s.

The conglomerates are primarily orthoquartzite monomict vein-pebble

Pebble

A pebble is a clast of rock with a particle size of 4 to 64 millimetres based on the Krumbein phi scale of sedimentology. Pebbles are generally considered to be larger than granules and smaller than cobbles . A rock made predominantly of pebbles is termed a conglomerate...

 conglomerates, or polymict pebble conglomerates. In low-strain zones they preserve graded bedding, cross-bedding

Cross-bedding

In geology, the sedimentary structures known as cross-bedding refer to horizontal units that are internally composed of inclined layers. This is a case in geology in which the original depositional layering is tilted, and the tilting is not a result of post-depositional deformation...

 and heavy mineral-rich horizons.

These rocks provide the bulk of age determinations from the Narryer Gneiss Terrane from detrital zircons, with the bulk of readings bracketing 3.5 to 3.75 billion years old, 3.35 to 3.45 billion years old, and a population of 4.1 to 4.2 billion years, with outliers of up to 4.45 billion years old.

Structure

The Narryer Gneiss Terrane has undergone many high-grade polyphase deformation events, with the most notable being at 2600 to 2700 Ma associated with granite-greenstone

Greenstone belt

Greenstone belts are zones of variably metamorphosed mafic to ultramafic volcanic sequences with associated sedimentary rocks that occur within Archaean and Proterozoic cratons between granite and gneiss bodies....

 magmatism

Magmatism

The formation of igneous rocks from magma is known as Magmatism.Magmatism is a process responsible for mountain formation. The process of magmatism produces an additional mass and volume to the Earth’s surface. For example the formation of volcanoes or island arcs at convergent plate boundaries...

 in the Yilgarn Craton

Yilgarn craton

The Yilgarn Craton is a large craton which constitutes the bulk of the Western Australian land mass. It is bounded by a mixture of sedimentary basins and Proterozoic fold and thrust belts...

, following an event at ~3350 Ma of amphibolite facies, resulting in widespread re-equilibration of geochronometers, preceded by a deformation loosely constrained to ~3680 Ma and another predating the Meeberrie Gneiss and postdating the Manfred Complex, between 3680 and 3730 Ma.

Older structural grain is preserved in areas of low stress in subsequent deformations; the 2700 to 2600 Ma Yilgarn Craton associated deformation has overprinted most other deformations, resulting in rotation of previous structures into parallelism with NE-trending upright folds and metamorphic banding.

Proximal to the Proterozoic orogens and thrust belts, the gneiss belt has become variably overprinted by later deformations. In the Bryah-Padbury Basin fold-thrust belt, Yarlarweelor Gneiss rafts exist as undeformed thrust plates of pelitic schist bounded by discrete mylonite zones, as well as deformed heavily overprinted gneiss blocks caught up within shear zones, some of which appear to preserve the unconformity surface.

Sequence of events

A simplified sequence of events known from the Narryer Gneiss Terrane of the Western Gneiss Belt of the Yilgarn craton is reproduced after A. F. Trendall (1991);

• 2000-1600 Ma;
  Basic dykes
  Dike (geology)
  A dike or dyke in geology is a type of sheet intrusion referring to any geologic body that cuts discordantly across* planar wall rock structures, such as bedding or foliation...
  
  , related to the Gascoyne Complex
  Gascoyne Complex
  The Gascoyne Complex is a terrane of Proterozoic granite and metamorphic rock in the central-western part of Western Australia. The complex outcrops at the exposed western end of the Capricorn Orogen, a 1,000 km-long arcuate belt of folded, faulted and metamorphosed rocks between two Archean...
  
   and Capricorn Orogeny
• 2700-2600 Ma;
  Granite sheets and juxtaposition with the Yilgarn craton.
• 3350-3300 Ma; Amphibolite to granulite facies metamorphism
• ~3350-3400 Ma; deposition of metasedimentary rocks
• 3400 Ma; Intrusion of syenogranite
  Syenogranite
  Syenogranite is a fine to coarse grained intrusive igneous rock of the same general composition as granite. They are characteristically felsic.The feldspar component of syenogranite is predominantly alkaline in character...
  
  s to form Dugel Gneiss, basic and ultramafic dykes
• >3400-3680 Ma; Deformation
• ~3680 Ma; Meeberrie Gneiss
• >3680-3730 Ma; Deformation
• ~3780 Ma; Manfred Complex ultramafic-mafic layered intrusion
• >4100 Ma; Metasedimentary precursor gneiss to host the Manfred Complex