Slave Craton

The Slave Craton is an Archaean craton in the northwestern Canadian Shield, located in Canada's Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and it includes the 4.03 billion year old Acasta Gneiss, one of the oldest dated rocks on Earth. Spanning approximately 300,000 square kilometers, this relatively small but well exposed craton is dominated by greenstones and turbidite sequences dated between about 2.73 and 2.63 billion years old, along with plutonic rocks dated between 2.72 and 2.58 billion years old and older gneiss and granitoid units. It represents one of the blocks making up the Precambrian core of North America known as the paleocontinent Laurentia, and its exposed Slave Province covers 172,500 square kilometers in an elliptical shape stretching 680 kilometers from Great Slave Lake to Coronation Gulf.