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 was dated to between 1 billion to 2 billion years ago.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 14 Aug. 2024
  • The scientists focused on the zircon that was contained in the meteorite.
    — Tom Rogers, Newsweek, 25 Nov. 2024
  • The zircon missile can travel nine times the speed of sound, according to intelligence on the new weapon.
    — Fox News, 28 May 2022
  • As zircon forms in cooling magma, its crystal structure contains uranium but no lead.
    — Scott Hershberger, Scientific American, 4 Aug. 2020
  • 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
  • The signature of Earth’s early rain was found inside zircon crystals from the Hadean Eon.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper's Magazine, 2 Sep. 2024
  • The researchers recovered zircons as old as 3 billion years, Ashwal says in a press release.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 2 Feb. 2017
  • 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
  • Scientists arrived at its true age after isolating certain minerals known as zircons.
    — Darren Orf, Popular Mechanics, 20 Nov. 2013
  • Pearce used a laser to vaporize the zircon, then analyzed its chemical composition.
    — Simon Akam, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2022
  • Another thing that the outcrop’s zircons told the researchers is that the Sturtian glaciation lasted around 58 million years.
    — Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 13 Sep. 2024
  • About 5,000 minerals — crystalline substances such as quartz, zircon and diamond — have been found on Earth.
    — Quanta Magazine, 11 Aug. 2015
  • His team studied ancient crystals, called zircons, that provided evidence of freshwater.
    — Julia Gomez, USA TODAY, 4 June 2024
  • 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
  • Patterson’s approach analyzed the small amounts of uranium contained in the mineral zircon.
    — Steven Johnson, New York Times, 15 Mar. 2023
  • 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
  • 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
  • The zircon crystals that formed during the Sturtian glaciation gradually disappear in younger rocks until they are replaced by zircons formed after the ice began to melt.
    — Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 13 Sep. 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The zircon grain may contain the oldest direct evidence of ancient hot water on the red planet, which may have provided environments such as hot springs that are associated with life on Earth.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 10 Dec. 2024
  • This technique involves evaporating individual atoms from one of the zircon crystals with a laser beam and identifying them, per the Washington Post.
    — Will Sullivan, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Oct. 2023
  • 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
  • While zircons from this time period have not yet been studied, Halverson notes that previous studies of snowball Earth have tracked the presence of iron, neodymium, and osmium in the geologic record.
    — Ars Technica, 28 Feb. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'zircon.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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