Quick
Search: 		  
advanced search
 GSW Home   GeoRef Home   My GSW Alerts   Contact GSW   About GSW   Journals List   Help 
Geology Don't get GSW? Talk to your librarian.
JOURNAL HOME HELP CONTACT PUBLISHER SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
Geology; March 2007; v. 35; no. 3; p. 239-242; DOI: 10.1130/G23057A.1
© 2007 Geological Society of America
This Article
Right arrow Figures Only
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Lease, R. O.
Right arrow Articles by Yuan, D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
GeoRef
Right arrow GeoRef Citation

Signatures of mountain building: Detrital zircon U/Pb ages from northeastern Tibet

Richard O. Lease*,1, Douglas W. Burbank1, George E. Gehrels2, Zhicai Wang3 and Daoyang Yuan3

1 Department of Earth Science, University of California-Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA
2 Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
3 State Key Laboratory of Earthquake Dynamics, Institute of Geology, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing 100029, China

Although detrital zircon has proven to be a powerful tool for determining provenance, past work has focused primarily on delimiting regional source terranes. Here we explore the limits of spatial resolution and stratigraphic sensitivity of detrital zircon in ascertaining provenance, and we demonstrate its ability to detect source changes for terranes separated by only a few tens of kilometers. For such an analysis to succeed for a given mountain, discrete intrarange source terranes must have unique U/Pb zircon age signatures and sediments eroded from the range must have well-defined depositional ages. Here we use ~1400 single-grain U/Pb zircon ages from northeastern Tibet to identify and analyze an area that satisfies these conditions. This analysis shows that the edges of intermontane basins are stratigraphically sensitive to discrete, punctuated changes in local source terranes. By tracking eroding rock units chronologically through the stratigraphic record, this sensitivity permits the detection of the differential rock uplift and progressive erosion that began ca. 8 Ma in the Laji Shan, a 10-25-km-wide range in northeastern Tibet with a unique U/Pb age signature.

Key Words: detrital zircon • Tibet • provenance • unroofing • Miocene • U/Pb






JOURNAL HOME HELP CONTACT PUBLISHER SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright © 2009 by Geological Society of America