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. 2016 Aug 19:6:29642.
doi: 10.1038/srep29642.

A comparison of zircon U-Pb age results of the Red Clay sequence on the central Chinese Loess Plateau

Hujun Gong  1 , Junsheng Nie  2 , Zhao Wang  2 , Wenbin Peng  2 , Rui Zhang  1 , Yunxiang Zhang  1
Affiliations

A comparison of zircon U-Pb age results of the Red Clay sequence on the central Chinese Loess Plateau

Hujun Gong et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Single grain zircon U-Pb geochronology has demonstrated great potentials in extracting tectonic and atmospheric circulation signal carried by aeolian, fluvial, and fluviolacustrine sediments. A routine in this sort of studies is analyzing 100-150 grains and then compares zircon U-Pb age spectra between the measured sample and the potential sources. Here we compared the zircon U-Pb age results of the late Miocene-Pliocene Red Clay sequence of two neighboring sites from the Chinese Loess Plateau where similar provenance signal is expected. Although the results from the 5.5 Ma sediment support this prediction, the results from the 3 Ma sediment at these two sites differ from each other significantly. These results emphasize the importance of increasing analysis number per sample and combining the zircon U-Pb geochronology with other provenance tools in order to get reliable provenance information.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Map showing the Chinese Loess Plateau and location of the study sites.
The main map corresponds to the area within the rectangle in the index map. Revised from Nie et al. (2013).
Figure 2
Figure 2. Distribution of detrital zircon U-Pb ages for Lingtai and Chaona Red Clay samples and one underlying sandstone sample.
Black and blue lines are normalized probability density (PDP) and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) plots, respectively; and the open rectangles are age histograms. Samples are arranged in stratigraphical order.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 4. Kernel density estimation-based MDS plot for samples in fig. 2.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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