TY - JOUR
T1 - Provenance analysis of the Yumen Basin and northern Qilian Shan
T2 - Implications for the pre-collisional paleogeography in the NE Tibetan plateau and eastern termination of Altyn Tagh fault
AU - Cheng, Feng
AU - Garzione, Carmala
AU - Jolivet, Marc
AU - Wang, Weitao
AU - Dong, Jibao
AU - Richter, Fabiana
AU - Guo, Zhaojie
N1 - Funding Information:
The research was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation ( EAR-1348005 and OISE-1545859 ) to Garzione, Open project fund from State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. SKLLQG1701 ) to Cheng, and National Science and Technology Major Project of China (Grant 2017ZX05008-001 ) to Guo. We are grateful to Editor-in-Chief Dr. M. Santosh, Associate Editor Dr. Zeming Zhang, Dr. Kendra Murray and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments that improved the paper. We gratefully acknowledge Mark Pecha, Nicky Giesler, Heather Alvarez, Mekha Pereira and Arizona Laserchron Center for their help with detrital zircon analysis. SRTM digital topography is from http://www.gscloud.cn .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018
PY - 2019/1
Y1 - 2019/1
N2 - Understanding the pre-collisional paleogeography in the NE Tibetan plateau provides insights into the growth mechanisms of the northern portion of the plateau in the Cenozoic. We conducted sandstone petrography analysis and determined U-Pb ages for detrital zircons from Cretaceous sandstone from the Yumen Basin and the northern Qilian Shan. Cretaceous strata in the northern Yumen Basin yield a unimodal age population at 290–240 Ma that indicates primary derivation from Bei Shan. Cretaceous strata in the westernmost Yumen Basin contain zircons of 2.6–2.2 Ga, 2.1–1.7 Ga, 1.4–0.7 Ga, 440–380 Ma and 300–230 Ma, suggesting source derivation from both the Qilian Shan and Bei Shan. Within the northern Qilian Shan, Cretaceous strata yield age populations of 2.8–2.3 Ga, 2.1–1.2 Ga, 480–380 Ma and ca. 270 Ma, indicating derivation from the Qilian Shan. Sandstone composition results show that a sample from the northern Qilian Shan contains more lithic fragments and plots in the recycled orogen field of the quartz-feldspar-lithics (QFL) diagram, while samples from Yumen Basin are more quartz-rich and plot close to the continental block field of the QFL diagram. This compositional difference corresponds to source variation, consistent with the detrital zircon record. Combined with existing sedimentology and low-temperature thermochronology datasets, we suggest the presence of Cretaceous topographic relief in the Bei Shan and Qilian Shan prior to India-Asia collision. Considering >300 km post-Cretaceous left-lateral offset along the Altyn Tagh Fault (ATF) and the consistently similar detrital zircon ages spectra of the samples from the Cretaceous to late Oligocene strata in the Yumen Basin, we infer the paleogeography in the NE Tibetan plateau has been similar from the late Cretaceous to the late Oligocene with ATF termination in the western Yumen Basin instead of having been linked to strike-slip faults in the Alxa or other regions to the east since its initiation.
AB - Understanding the pre-collisional paleogeography in the NE Tibetan plateau provides insights into the growth mechanisms of the northern portion of the plateau in the Cenozoic. We conducted sandstone petrography analysis and determined U-Pb ages for detrital zircons from Cretaceous sandstone from the Yumen Basin and the northern Qilian Shan. Cretaceous strata in the northern Yumen Basin yield a unimodal age population at 290–240 Ma that indicates primary derivation from Bei Shan. Cretaceous strata in the westernmost Yumen Basin contain zircons of 2.6–2.2 Ga, 2.1–1.7 Ga, 1.4–0.7 Ga, 440–380 Ma and 300–230 Ma, suggesting source derivation from both the Qilian Shan and Bei Shan. Within the northern Qilian Shan, Cretaceous strata yield age populations of 2.8–2.3 Ga, 2.1–1.2 Ga, 480–380 Ma and ca. 270 Ma, indicating derivation from the Qilian Shan. Sandstone composition results show that a sample from the northern Qilian Shan contains more lithic fragments and plots in the recycled orogen field of the quartz-feldspar-lithics (QFL) diagram, while samples from Yumen Basin are more quartz-rich and plot close to the continental block field of the QFL diagram. This compositional difference corresponds to source variation, consistent with the detrital zircon record. Combined with existing sedimentology and low-temperature thermochronology datasets, we suggest the presence of Cretaceous topographic relief in the Bei Shan and Qilian Shan prior to India-Asia collision. Considering >300 km post-Cretaceous left-lateral offset along the Altyn Tagh Fault (ATF) and the consistently similar detrital zircon ages spectra of the samples from the Cretaceous to late Oligocene strata in the Yumen Basin, we infer the paleogeography in the NE Tibetan plateau has been similar from the late Cretaceous to the late Oligocene with ATF termination in the western Yumen Basin instead of having been linked to strike-slip faults in the Alxa or other regions to the east since its initiation.
KW - Altyn Tagh Fault
KW - Cretaceous paleogeography
KW - Detrital zircon geochronology
KW - Northeastern Tibetan plateau
KW - Sandstone petrography
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U2 - 10.1016/j.gr.2018.08.009
DO - 10.1016/j.gr.2018.08.009
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85056164934
VL - 65
SP - 156
EP - 171
JO - Gondwana Research
JF - Gondwana Research
SN - 1342-937X
ER -