From Source to Sink: Exhumation of the North America Cordillera Revealed by Multi-dating of Detrital Minerals from Upper Jurassic-Upper Cretaceous Sevier Foreland Basin

We sampled twenty-two Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous syn-orogenic conglomerate clasts in proximal units in the Sevier fold-thrust belt and their distal sandstone equivalents up to 300 km east of the thrust front, in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota. To better constrain depositional ages, these samples were analyzed using detrital zircon U-Pb (DZ U-Pb) geochronology. To identify a thermochronometer that measures source exhumation in the North America Cordillera, both zircon (U-Th)/He and apatite fission track (AFT) thermochronology was utilized, on both the conglomerate cobbles and sandstone (detrital) samples. Eleven samples were analyzed with zircon (U-Th)/He; however, discordant ages in the conglomerate cobble samples suggest that this system was not fully reset and never experienced T> ~180 °C in the source stratigraphy during the Sevier orogeny. Eleven other samples are analyzed using apatite fission track thermochronology (AFT); AFT ages are generally similar or older than depositional ages indicating that the detrital ages record source exhumation signals, and that exhumation depth corresponds to T>~120 °C. In order to test whether or not the youngest cooling AFT age population represents a source exhumation signal or a co-magmatic signal we here performed double dating of the detrital AFT samples using apatite U-Pb thermochronology. Maximum depositional ages using DZ U-Pb match existing age controls on basin stratigraphy. Our study shows that AFT is an effective thermochronometer to detect source exhumation for Cretaceous foreland stratigraphy in the western U.S.A. Lag-times (i.e. the difference between the source exhumation age and depositional age) are ~0 to 5 Myr with relatively steady-state to slightly increasing exhumation rates suggesting orogenic growth at this time. The very short lag times also indicate limited to no storage time between source and sink. The AFT lag time of the Early Cretaceous Kelvin Formation is ~5 Myr and represents a time when the Canyon Range Thrust was active to the southwest. Upper Cretaceous units have an approximate lag time of 0 Myr, during a time when the Willard, Crawford, Medicine Butte and Absaroka Thrust systems were active to the west. These lag-time measurements correspond to exhumation rates of ~0.8 mm/yr to >>1 mm/yr.