Late Cretaceous-Cenozoic Exhumation History of the Luliang Mountains, North China Craton: Constraint from Fission-track Thermochronology

The Luliang Mountains, located in the North China Craton, is a relatively stable block, but it has experienced uplift and denudation since the late Mesozoic. We hence aim to explore its time and rate of the exhumation by the fission-track method. The results show that, no matter what type rocks are, the pooled ages of zircon and apatite fission-track range from 60.0 to 93.7 Ma and 28.6 to 43.3 Ma, respectively; all of the apatite fission-track length distributions are unimodal and yield a mean length of similar to 13 mu m; and the thermal history modeling results based on apatite fission-track data indicate that the time-temperature paths exhibit similar patterns and the cooling has been accelerated for each sample since the Pliocene (c.5 Ma). Therefore, we can conclude that a successive cooling, probably involving two slow (during c.75-35 Ma and 35-5 Ma) and one rapid (during c.5 Ma-0 Ma) cooling, has occurred through the exhumation of the Luliang Mountains since the late Cretaceous. The maximum exhumation is more than 5 km under a steady-state geothermal gradient of 35 degrees C/km. Combined with the tectonic setting, this exhumation may be the resultant effect from the surrounding plate interactions, and it has been accelerated since c.5 Ma predominantly due to the India-Eurasia collision.