Alluvial Fans as Recorders of Landscape Development: Potential for Determining Depositional Chronologies Using Luminescence Dating

Alluvial fans in both arid and humid environments provide a record of depositional events at the transition between mountain and lowland environments. Though complex in the detail of their depositional and erosional characteristics, they undoubtedly provide a valuable record of the highest erosion rate events in their upland catchments. Alluvial fans often also record tectonic activity; their mountain-front location is ideal to intersect bounding faults, and their characteristic geometry renders offsets easily recognisable. Dating of Quaternary alluvial fans can be accomplished using a number of techniques. These include radiocarbon dating where suitable organic materials are preserved; uranium series methods may be applied to provide a minimum age by dating carbonate inter-clast cements in some arid or semi-arid environments; terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (TCN) methods work well in many dryland contexts though issues of inheritance in some catchments are significant. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) rely on light sensitive charge populations trapped at meta-stable centers associated with impurities in quartz and feldspar grains. When grains are exposed to light, charge is evicted from these traps, and is slowly re-tapped by interaction with environmental ionizing radiaton. These signals have the potential to date a range of Quaternary sediments including alluvial fans on timescales of one year to several hundred thousand years. The specific issues relating to alluvial fans are problems of incomplete signal zeroing caused by rapid deposition, as well as low sensitivity and poor signal characteristics for quartz OSL. In this presentation, we explore the relative importance of these issues in determining luminescence chronologies for alluvial fans in different locations, and the ways in which these chronologies may be used to help inform models of landscape evolution, both numerical and conceptual.