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Continuous Thermal Histories from Inversion of Closure Profiles

Research School of Earth Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T. 0200, Australia, director.rses@anu.edu.au

Marty Grove and Oscar M. Lovera

Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, 90095, U.S.A.

Peter K. Zeitler

Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 18015, U.S.A.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
Background
Most geophysical processes impart a characteristic thermal signature to the crust that can be preserved in the form of isotopic variations in radiogenic minerals. Reading the record of these events using thermochronology permits unprecedented insights into the timing and rates of key dynamic processes, such as rifting, thrust faulting, tectonic denudation, erosion/incision, and magmatism, that may otherwise go unnoticed (McDougall and Harrison 1999). However, thermal disturbances are often too subtle to be revealed by conventional thermochronometric methods; i.e., interpolation of discrete temperature-time (T-t) points from bulk analyses using "nominal" closure temperatures. Rather, the highest resolution thermal histories require harnessing knowledge of the concentration distribution of the daughter product in the mineral of interest.

In previous chapters, the case has been explored in which a mineral cooling within the crust transitions from being open to loss of daughter product to closed system behavior. Assuming a monotonic thermal history of simple form (Dodson 1973), it is then possible to use the balance between radiogenic accumulation and loss to assign a bulk closure temperature, T_c, which is given by:

(1)

where E is the activation energy, D₀ is the frequency factor, R is the gas constant, T is absolute temperature, A is a geometry factor (sphere = 55, cylinder = 27, and plane sheet = 8.7), r is the effective diffusion length scale (radius or half-width), and dT/dt is cooling rate. When the T_c and age of a number of coexisting mineral thermochronometers are correlated, an estimate of the temperature history can be interpolated. This method, termed the bulk closure approach, has been used for nearly 30 years (Purdy and Jäger 1976; Mattinson 1978; Berger et al. 1979; Harrison et al. 1979).

However, use of Equation (1) carries . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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