Building a Young Mountain Range: Insight into the Along-Strike
Exhumation History of the Greater Caucasus Mountains from Detrital
Zircon (U-Th)/He Thermochronology and 10Be Erosion Rates
Abstract
The Greater Caucasus (GC) Mountains within the central Arabia-Eurasia
collision zone, are an archetypal example of a young collisional orogen.
However, the mechanisms driving rock uplift in the range are
controversial, with recent provocative suggestions that uplift of the
western GC is strongly influenced by an isostatic response to slab
detachment, whereas the eastern half has grown through shortening and
crustal thickening. Testing this hypothesis is challenging because
records of erosion and exhumation rates mostly come from the western GC,
where slab detachment may have occurred. To address this, we report 623
new, paired zircon U-Pb and (U-Th)/He ages from 7 different modern river
sediments, spanning a ~400 km long gap in bedrock
thermochronometer data. We synthesize these with prior bedrock
thermochronometer data and recent catchment averaged
10Be cosmogenic erosion rates, structural
observations, and plate reconstructions. We find no evidence of major
differences in rates or timing of onset of cooling or total amounts of
exhumation along the length of the range, incompatible with previous
suggestions of heterogeneous drivers for exhumation along-strike.
Comparison of exhumation and extrapolated millennial erosion rates are
permissive of an acceleration of rates in the western GC, but are
problematic because these regions are also influenced by Quaternary
glaciations that may bias the erosion rate estimates. Intergration of
these new datasets with simple models of orogenic growth suggest that
the gross topography of the GC is explainable with traditional models of
accretion, thickening, and uplift and does not require any additional
dynamic explanations.