| Abstract: | Evolution of the Yangtze River in East Asia is closely linked to the evolving topography following India-Eurasia collision and plays an important role in connecting the Tibetan plateau and the marginal sea, which is of great significance for understanding the evolution of modern Asian landform pattern and exploring the response of river development to tectonic uplift and monsoon evolution. Thus, many methods have been performed to reconstruct the evolution history of the Yangtze River, but there are still some disputes about the age of the Yangtze River, which has been strongly debated for over a century with estimates ranging from late Cretaceous to late Pleistocene. At present, sediment provenance tracing is one of the most important methods for studying the Yangtze River drainage evolution, for the provenance tracers could effectively represent the source area information and the various dating methods would provide reliable chronology framework. Previous studies showed that the zircon high closure temperature, wide distribution in fluvial sediment, and convenient sampling and analyzing made the zircon U-Pb dating a unique indicator recording the source area information. However, the Yangtze River drains a large basin and runs through different geological blocks with complicated lithology, as well as the abundant thermal historical events, leading to the zircon U-Pb dating a challenge work in tracing the sediment source within the Yangtze River Basin. In this study, based on the combination of previous research data and the "source to sink" system, the limitations and disadvantages of the detrital zircon U-Pb dating in the studies of sediment provenance tracing of the Yangtze River Basin were re-analyzed and re-discussed. Considering the evolving process of the large river system, some key areas and diagnostic information carrier, including bedrock and fluvial sediments deposited in present day or geo-history, would provide significant constraints on the evolution process. The former records the original information of the source region, and the latter reserves the practical information preserved in the downstream sink.
As for the Yangtze River Basin, the limitation and disadvantages of the detrital zircon U-Pb dating in tracing sediment provenance are showed as follows:Firstly, six major tectonic units in the source region shows four similar age peaks, which closely corresponds to the previously identified synchronous major granitoid magmatic episodes. Five similar age peaks obviously exist in the sediment of the downstream sink both in the modern fluvial sediment and the geo-historical deposits such as outcrops and basin sediments. Thus, detrital zircon U-Pb chronology is indistinguishable from source to sink, making it unreliable in provenance tracing of the Yangtze River. Secondly, comparing with the detrital zircon spectra of tributary downstream and the upper reaches, all the tributaries below the Three Gores, the running-through of which is regarded as the symbol of the establishment of the modern Yangtze River system, could make up the similar spectra with the modern river sediments. Moreover, Sichuan Basin and Jianghan Basin, which is the last basin and first basin in western and eastern of the Three Gorges, are crucial basins for recording the incision information. However, sediment in these two basins show the similar spectra with five major age peaks from early Jurassic to late Cretaceous, which means the detrital zircon U-Pb chronology could not efficiently record the capture information no matter in spatial scale or time scale. In addition, the same results are also shown in Neogene gravel layer both in Jianghan Basin and Nanjing area. In summary, we propose that the similarity of the detrital zircon age spectra exists widely in Yangtze River system, and this greatly restricts the application of detrital zircon chronology in provenance tracing in the Yangtze River Basin, and the combination of multi-index and multi-method will shed new light in the future studies of provenance tracing within Yangtze River drainage system. |
