祁连山东段河流阶地年代及其成因.pdfVIP

Dating of the River Terraces in Eastern Qilian Shan, Northwest China Baotian Pan, Hongshan Gao, Jijun Li Key Laboratory of Western China’s Environmental Systems, Ministry of Education, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China Abstract The actively deformed foreland of eastern Qilian Shan (mountains) contains well-preserved geomorphic features such as river terraces and tectonically uplifted alluvial fans, providing suitable archives for research on regional tectonic activities and paleoclimatic changes. These geomorphic surfaces are well dated by using a combination of magnetostratigraphy, electron spin resonance (ESR), thermoluminescence (TL), infra-red stimulated luminescence (IRSL), radiocarbon dating, and correlation with the well-established loess-paleosol sequences of China. Our results show that the age of river terraces is 1.24 Ma, 820~870 ka, 780 ka, 420~440 ka, 230~250 ka, 140 ka, 60 ka and 10 ka, respectively. Repetitive stratigraphic and geomorphic pattern on these terraces indicate that climate variations play a significant role in controlling regional fluvial geomorphic evolution, even within this tectonic active regions. Keywords: chronology; river terraces; Qilian Shan Introduction The dating of geomorphic surfaces is critical to understanding landscape evolution (Watchman et al., 2002), however, reliable dating results with acceptable precision and accuracy are hard to obtain due often to lack of suitable dating materials and the limitations of various dating techniques. For example, radiocarbon dating is widely applied on organic matter preserved ei