Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published July 15, 2010 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Early Cenozoic faulting of the northern Tibetan Plateau margin from apatite (U–Th)/He ages

Abstract

Models to explain the distributed nature of continental deformation predict the propagation of strain and high topography away from the plate boundary. Yet a growing body of evidence in the Tibetan orogen suggests that deformation occurred at the far northern extent of the modern plateau early in the orogen's history and thus our current mechanical understanding of orogenic plateau development is incomplete. New apatite (U–Th)/He ages from four elevation transects document periods of rapid exhumation related to erosion pulses in hanging wall rocks of major thrust structures. Accelerated erosion is used as a proxy of fault timing, and is interpreted in a larger context of structural data and sediment accumulation in adjacent foreland basins. Helium results are synthesized with published geologic, thermochronometric, and sedimentologic data from which a growing picture of regional compressional deformation in Middle to Late Eocene time in northern Tibet emerges. We relate the early Cenozoic period of deformation to the initiation of collision between India and Eurasia, despite the fact that the plate boundary was located > 3000 km to the south. Regardless of whether or not high topography was built simultaneously as a result of this deformation, early Cenozoic strain signifies that the modern limit of the orogen has been relatively stationary since continental collision began and that deformation has not significantly propagated farther away from the plate boundary in time.

Additional Information

© 2010 Elsevier B.V. Received 3 July 2009; revised 28 April 2010; accepted 30 April 2010. Editor: R.D. van der Hilst. Available online 8 June 2010. This work was supported by NSF grants EAR-0507431 (Clark) and EAR-0507788 (Farley), Texaco Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship to Clark and National Science Foundation of China (40234040, 40772127) and by State Key Laboratory of Earthquake Dynamics (LED2008A01) (Zheng and Wang). We thank Lindsey Hedges for sample preparation and analyses; Carmala Garzione, Eric Kirby, Peter Molnar, Gerard Roe and Dao-Yang Yuan for field assistance; Doug Burbank and Peter Molnar for comments; and Todd Ehlers for discussion of sedimentary basin thermal gradients. An anonymous reviewer provided valuable feedback that improved the clarity of the manuscript.

Attached Files

Supplemental Material - f.xls

Files

Files (62.0 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:f6baa5bf0952d1f400e470e9cc34e788
62.0 kB Download

Additional details

Created:
August 23, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023