Short-lived mantle generated magmatic events and their dyke swarms: The key unlocking Earth's palaeogeographic record back to 2.6 Ga

Continents preserve a rich record of short-lived mafic magmatic events through time and space. Many of these events can now be dated, routinely and precisely. The spatial and temporal association of such events with rifting and continental break-up leads to remnants being preserved on originally adjacent (conjugate) margins and their respective hinterlands. Originally adjacent but now distant pieces of crust thus likely share remnants of one, if not several, short-lived magmatic events. The overall record of short-lived magmatic events in a particular fragment of continental crust defines, in essence, a high-resolution "barcode" that characterizes the ancestry of that piece of crust. Temporal matching of these "barcodes", together with spatial and geometrical matching of "precise piercing points", provides the most general, most efficient, and most robust method for reconstructing ancient continents. To illustrate the general methodology, we present the most detailed Archaean craton correlation yet proposed, between Superior, Hearne, Karelia and Wyoming.