What Is It About Zircon That Makes It So Durable?

Zircon is a remarkably hard mineral, capable of being transported by wind and water without physically breaking down. Once zircon forms and locks in its chemistry from the time of formation, any later metamorphic event or magma that interacts with it does not modify its original chemistry. These zircons then, when they form, do they create some kind of snapshot of Earth's chemistry all that time ago? That is exactly right. The mere presence of the mineral itself is not diagnostic of a particular rock type or a tectonic environment. It is the chemistry, the trace constituents within the zircon structure that provide us with clues as to what its formation environment may have been