U–Pb zircon ages as a sediment mixing tracer in the Nepal Himalaya

Paleoproterozoic granitic gneisses of the Dinggye and LhagoiKangri areas from the higher and northern Himalaya, Tibet: Geochronology and implications

“…However, this study shows very similar granitic gneiss ages among NHM, HHM and LHM, and other studies as mentioned in this paper show much younger age recorded in HHM than that in LHM. Furthermore, based on the study of detrital zircon ages of present sediments from Himalaya, Amidon [41] suggested that the eroding rate of LHM is three times of that of HHM. All of these indicate the same and even younger crystalline rock and less uplifted distance in HHM than LHM and are inconsist with the present model ( Figure 9).…”

Detrital zircon evidence for Hf isotopic evolution of granitoid crust and continental growth

“…This indicates the ubiquitous granitoid crust formation by around 3.3 Ga, and also implies that sedimentary recycling has been operative since that time, thereby preserving circa 3.3 Ga zircons in modern sediments widely. It should be noted that the paucity of >3.3 Ga detrital zircons has been commonly recognized for other large rivers (Ledent et al, 1964;Goldstein et al, 1997;Bodet and Schärer, 2000;Rino et al, 2004Rino et al, , 2008Amidon et al, 2005;Condie et al, 2005;Campbell and Allen, 2008;Yang et al, 2009).…”

Erosion patterns in the Changjiang (Yangtze River) catchment revealed by bulk-sample versus single-mineral provenance budgets

“…Estimating sediment budgets based on one mineralogical species is a common but potentially misleading practice if the abundance of the considered detrital mineral in different parent rocks, tectonic domains, or river branches is not taken into full account. Because mineral fertilities can and generally do vary strongly even in homogeneous plutonic source rocks (Dickinson, 2008) and by orders of magnitude in the heterogeneous lithological assemblages exposed in orogenic terranes (Malusà et al, 2015), they can hardly be quantified with the necessary accuracy and precision (e.g., Amidon et al, 2005). In huge drainage basins such as that of the Changjiang, assessing mineral fertilities in the countless types of source rocks is not feasible.…”

“…The petrographic and mineralogical signature of sediments derived from an evolving orogen, which depends primarily on the lithology of source terranes and their progressive unroofing , represents an effective additional tool to trace erosion processes in space and time Najman et al, 2009). In principle, any detrital component and any type of fingerprint (e.g., geochemical, isotopic, geochronological) can be used as a provenance tracer to partition the sediment flux into its different sources and hence to calculate denudation rates in different parts of a river catchment (Singh and France-Lanord, 2002;Lee et al, 2003;Amidon et al, 2005;Padoan et al, 2011). The resulting erosion patterns will not be identical and their comparison will allow us to evaluate the robustness of each different approach, a test that we have carried out for the Changjiang (long river in Chinese), the largest sediment-routing system in Eurasia and one of the longest in the world.…”