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5 - Thermal effects of exhumation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2009

Jean Braun
Affiliation:
Australian National University, Canberra
Peter van der Beek
Affiliation:
Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble
Geoffrey Batt
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
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Summary

In our quest to extract information on exhumation from thermochronological data, we now turn our attention to the effects that exhumation itself, i.e. the advection of rocks towards the Earth's surface, may have on the temperature structure of the crust. It is important to realise that the process that we are trying to quantify, namely rock exhumation, is strongly non-linear: it perturbs the system that we propose to use to measure it, i.e. the temperature history of the rock.

Steady-state solution

We first provide a means of determining the perturbation caused by advection under the assumption of steady-state exhumation, i.e. for situations in which rock uplift is balanced by erosion over a long period of time. Although this is an idealised scenario, it is worth considering, in order to assess the magnitude of the perturbation and the conditions under which it is likely to be significant. Furthermore, thermal steady state is not an unlikely scenario when considered on the scale of an entire, mature orogen, such as in the Southern Alps of New Zealand or in the Taiwan orogen (Willett and Brandon, 2002).

Uplift and exhumation

As already mentioned in Section 1.2, it is very important always to keep in mind that the cooling that is documented by thermochronology during exhumation is related to the advection of rocks towards the cold upper surface of the Earth.

Type
Chapter
Information
Quantitative Thermochronology
Numerical Methods for the Interpretation of Thermochronological Data
, pp. 76 - 104
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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