The history of the continental crust is the sum of processes of new crust generation and reworking of pre-existing crustal components (Cawood et al., 2021). Granite is a key component of the continental crust and is mainly formed at convergent continental margins in accretionary and collisional orogens (Sawyer et al., 2011;Zheng & Gao, 2021). Leucogranite, characterized by less than 5% of dark-colored minerals (e.g., biotite), is a minor but widely distributed component of most orogens in Western Europe (e.g.,

Sea level is thought to be the primary driver of alternating deposition of carbonate and siliciclastic sediment in shelf settings, with carbonates dominating during transgressive/highstands and siliciclastics during lowstands. Although sediment supply is critically important for shelf-margin growth in siliciclastic systems, few studies demonstrate its impact on mixed carbonate-siliciclastic systems. The Permian Basin in Texas, United States, provides an opportunity to investigate the basin evolution regarding the source, sediment routing and particularly shelf/slope growth from synto postorogenic phases during alternating carbonate and siliciclastic sedimentation.Published detrital zircon data show that the proportion of orogen-related sources decreased significantly from an earliest Permian synorogenic phase (ca. 298 Ma) to a Leonardian (ca. 280-271 Ma) postorogenic phase, in concert with a grain-size change from fine-to medium-grained sand to silt. Although along-strike lateral variabilities exist on the shelf margin, the shelf-margin evolution characteristics show a significant difference among the Northern Shelf, Eastern Shelf and Central Basin Platform. The synorogenic Eastern Shelf exhibits a significant higher progradation rate than does the postorogenic Northern Shelf. The progradation and aggradation ratio of siliciclastic-rich intervals in the Eastern Shelf is significantly higher than those of carbonate-rich intervals in the Eastern Shelf and carbonate-or siliciclasticrich intervals in the Northern Shelf. In contrast, the Central Basin Platform, with no siliciclastic sediment supply, records almost no progradation regardless of orogenic phases. There is an increase in slope gradient with decreasing sediment supply during this second-order sequence from the Permian Cisuralian Series to the end of the Guadalupian Series. This study demonstrates that tectonically driven siliciclastic sediment supply was the main mechanism controlling the shelf and slope evolution in alternating siliciclastic and carbonate deposition.

Detrital zircon (DZ) geochronology has become a popular tool in provenance studies during the past two decades. However, similar zircon crystallization ages from different source regions greatly hamper the interpretation of sediment dispersal and recycling processes. The Alleghenian–Ouachita–Marathon (AOM) foreland and vicinity in North America is a region where some dominant DZ age groups could come from both the southern Appalachians in the eastern United States and the Gondwanan terranes in Mexico. In this study, we present 1045 new DZ U–Pb ages and 81 DZ core–rim age pairs in lower Permian sandstone in the Permian Basin and Miocene sandstone in the eastern Gulf of Mexico (GOM). These new data were integrated with published DZ single U–Pb age and core–rim ages from syn‐ to post‐orogenic strata in the Permian Basin, Marathon foldbelt, southern Appalachian foreland basin and eastern GOM to interpret the sediment‐dispersal models in the AOM foreland and eastern GOM. Our models show that during the Leonardian Stage, sediments derived from the Appalachians were first delivered to the US midcontinent and then recycled to the Permian Basin; during the Miocene, sediment from the Appalachians fluxed to the eastern GOM, with no longshore mixing from the western GOM. These models based on the integration of single U–Pb and core–rim ages are consistent with published results that used other methods, including zircon single U–Pb age, zircon Hf isotopic data, zircon (U–Th)/He age, sedimentology and stratigraphy. Our results demonstrate that although some limitations exist, zircon core–rim age is a powerful tool, adding an extra constraint on the interpretation of sediment‐dispersal systems. This tool is particularly applicable to the post‐orogenic stage, during which the sediment pathways are more complicated because of the dominant input from distal sources. Insights gained in this study imply that this novel strategy of using core and rim ages could be integrated with other methods to better understand sediment dispersal.