Southern Australia’s Cenozoic Eucla basin contains world-class strandline heavy mineral deposits. This study links detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology and heavy mineral compositions from four mineral sand prospects, and a suite of published deposits, to bounding Archean to Neoproterozoic crustal areas. A variable number of distinct sediment sources is recorded from each prospect’s detrital zircon age spectrum. This variability in zircon ages, quantified using a Shannon-Weaver test, serves as a metric of source region heterogeneity. Greater zircon age heterogeneity correlates with heavy mineral enrichment. Enhanced heavy mineral yields reflect retention of resistate over labile minerals—a function of greater sediment transport, reworking, and upgrading processes that parallel those that result in detrital zircon age polymodality. In this case study, greater reworking in intermediate storage sites and transport by longshore processes, eastward along the ~1,000 km spanned by the study sites, corresponds to the direction of progressive heavy mineral enrichment identified in zircon ages and mineral compositions. This approach is a proxy for the duration minerals have spent in the sedimentary system and provides an important perspective for understanding heavy mineral sands.

中文翻译：

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澳大利亚尤克拉盆地重矿物砂系统的碎屑锆石透视

南澳大利亚的新生代 Eucla 盆地拥有世界级的陆线重质矿床。这项研究将碎屑锆石 U-Pb 地质年代学和来自四个矿砂前景的重矿物成分以及一系列已发表的矿床与太古宙至新元古代地壳区域联系起来。从每个勘探区的碎屑锆石年龄谱中记录了不同数量的不同沉积物来源。使用 Shannon-Weaver 检验量化的这种锆石年龄变异性可作为源区异质性的度量。较大的锆石年龄非均质性与重矿物富集相关。增加的重矿物产量反映了对不稳定矿物的抵抗物的保留——这是更大的沉积物运输、再加工和升级过程的功能，这些过程与导致碎屑锆石年龄多峰性的过程平行。在本案例研究中，沿着研究地点跨越的约 1,000 公里向东，中间储存地点的更大改造和沿岸过程的运输，对应于锆石年龄和矿物成分中确定的渐进式重矿物富集的方向。这种方法代表了矿物在沉积系统中停留的时间，并为理解重矿砂提供了重要的视角。