The Lüliang Mountains, located in the North China Craton, is a relatively stable block, but it has experienced uplift and denudation since the late Mesozoic. We hence aim to explore its time and rate of the exhum...The Lüliang Mountains, located in the North China Craton, is a relatively stable block, but it has experienced uplift and denudation since the late Mesozoic. We hence aim to explore its time and rate of the exhumation by the fission-track method. The results show that, no matter what type rocks are, the pooled ages of zircon and apatite fission-track range from 60.0 to 93.7 Ma and 28.6 to 43.3 Ma, respectively; all of the apatite fission-track length distributions are unimodal and yield a mean length of -13 μm; and the thermal history modeling results based on apatite fission-track data indicate that the time-temperature paths exhibit similar patterns and the cooling has been accelerated for each sample since the Pliocene (c.5 Ma). Therefore, we can conclude that a successive cooling, probably involving two slow (during c.75-35Ma and 35-5Ma) and one rapid (during c.5 Ma-0 Ma) cooling, has occurred through the exhumation of the Liiliang Mountains since the late Cretaceous. The maximum exhumation is more than 5 km under a steady-state geothermal gradient of 35℃/km. Combined with the tectonic setting, this exhumation may be the resultant effect from the surrounding plate interactions, and it has been accelerated since c.5 Ma predominantly due to the India-Eurasia collision.展开更多
基金supported by the State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology(Grant No.SKLLQG0507)National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos. 40572124 and 40772116)+1 种基金Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry,Chinese Academy of Sciences(Grant No. 050713)This is contribution No.IS-1157 from GIGCAS
文摘The Lüliang Mountains, located in the North China Craton, is a relatively stable block, but it has experienced uplift and denudation since the late Mesozoic. We hence aim to explore its time and rate of the exhumation by the fission-track method. The results show that, no matter what type rocks are, the pooled ages of zircon and apatite fission-track range from 60.0 to 93.7 Ma and 28.6 to 43.3 Ma, respectively; all of the apatite fission-track length distributions are unimodal and yield a mean length of -13 μm; and the thermal history modeling results based on apatite fission-track data indicate that the time-temperature paths exhibit similar patterns and the cooling has been accelerated for each sample since the Pliocene (c.5 Ma). Therefore, we can conclude that a successive cooling, probably involving two slow (during c.75-35Ma and 35-5Ma) and one rapid (during c.5 Ma-0 Ma) cooling, has occurred through the exhumation of the Liiliang Mountains since the late Cretaceous. The maximum exhumation is more than 5 km under a steady-state geothermal gradient of 35℃/km. Combined with the tectonic setting, this exhumation may be the resultant effect from the surrounding plate interactions, and it has been accelerated since c.5 Ma predominantly due to the India-Eurasia collision.