Detrital Thermochronology

Clastic sedimentary sequences shed from orogenic belts provide a fertile, and arguably unique, record of crustal exhumation. A spectrum of closure ages yielded by detrital grains from a dated sedimentary horizon contains information on the distribution of crustal depths exposed in a basement source region at the corresponding time of erosion. We have developed a variety of two-dimensional, thermokinetic models that predict the closure age distributions of detrital minerals from pervasively intruded and differentially exhumed basement.