Pilbara Craton

The Pilbara Craton is an old, stable block of continental lithosphere in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, covering about 250,000 square kilometers with a crust as much as 20 kilometers thick, built mainly of granite intruded through greenstone belts alongside sedimentary and volcanic rock basins. Its crust records the Eoarchean through the Paleoproterozoic, with rock as old as 3.8 to 2.7 billion years, one of only two such pristine Archean crustal sections known on Earth, and its youngest exposed rock dates to about 1.7 billion years ago; some geologists propose it once formed part of an ancient supercontinent, Vaalbara or Ur. The craton hosts extensive high-quality iron ore deposits alongside economic quantities of gold, silver, copper, nickel, lead, zinc, molybdenum, vanadium and fluorite. Its Dresser Formation preserves geyserite deposits 3.48 billion years old holding some of the earliest known evidence of life on land, and its North Pole Dome is the oldest dated impact structure on Earth, at 3.47 billion years. This entity documents the Pilbara Craton specifically as a geological formation.