page_title: Slave Craton
section_title: Craton stabilization
hierarchical_section_title: Slave Craton / Evolution of Slave Craton / Craton stabilization
caption_attribution_description: English: An E-W cross-section of the Slave Craton highlighting its basic stratigraphy and margins.
context_page_description: The Slave Craton is an Archaean craton in the north-western Canadian Shield, in Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The Slave Craton includes the 4.03 Ga-old Acasta Gneiss which is one of the oldest dated rocks on Earth.
  Covering about 300,000 km², it is a relatively small but well-exposed craton dominated by ~2.73–2.63 Ga greenstones and turbidite sequences and ~2.72–2.58 Ga plutonic rocks, with large parts of the craton underlain by older gneiss and granitoid units.
  The Slave Craton is one of the blocks that compose the Precambrian core of North America, also known as the palaeocontinent Laurentia.
  The exposed portion of the craton, called the Slave Province, comprises 172,500 km² and has an elliptical shape that stretches 680 km NNE from Gros Cap on the Great Slave Lake to Cape Barrow on the Coronation Gulf and 460 km EW along latitude 64°N. It covers about 700 km × 500 km and is bounded by Palaeoproterozoic belts to the south, east, and west, while younger rocks cover it to the north.
  The Slave Craton is divided into a west-central basement complex, the Central Slave Basement Complex, and an eastern province, named the Hackett River Terrane or the Eastern Slave Province.
context_section_description: The overall stability of a craton is highly correlated to the presence of a strong and deep continental lithospheric mantle because it protects the crust from thermal erosion and mitigates the effects of tectonism. The Slave Craton shows a long history of continental lithospheric mantle formation. Diamond formation is relatively extensive throughout the Slave Craton and requires a thick cratonic root. The oldest diamonds derived from the mantle were between 3.5 and 3.3 Ga, which suggest that the Slave Protocraton would have formed a thick crustal root by this time. The main stabilization of the Slave craton occurred in the Neoarchean at ~2.75 Ga as noted by an abundance of peridotite formation  The Kaapval Craton showed a similar peak age of growth which may suggest that much of the earth's continental lithospheric mantle was formed in the Neoarchean The formation and stabilization of the continental lithospheric mantle and the evolution of the crust are closely related during the period between 2.8 and 2.0 Ga.
caption: An east–west cross-section of the Slave Province showing its basic stratigraphy and margins
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