Denudation Process of Crystalline Nappes in a Continental Collision Zone Constrained by Inversion of Fission‐Track Data and Thermokinematic Forward Modeling: An Example From Eastern Nepalese Himalaya

Abstract

The Himalayas are the modern example of orogen associated with a continent-continent collision and have been the subject of many studies as a natural laboratory to understand continental collision processes. Thermochronology has been a quite common way to constrain the denudation history of the convergent orogen (Reiners & Ehlers, 2005). It has been applied to the Himalayas since the 1990s to understand denudation processes, and as a result, a large number of thermochronological data have been published (Thiede & Ehlers, 2013 and references therein). The abundant thermochronological datasets coupled with numerical experiments demonstrate that orogen-wide denudation over millions of years is controlled primarily by tectonics, and erosion plays a subordinate role. Several tectono-thermal models have been proposed to explain the denudation process of the mountain range (