Detrital zircon dataset and it’s tectonic implications from the Qilian-Qaidam-Kunlun collage, northern Tibet

Abstract

In the past decades, detrital zircon geochronology has been most widely used in sediment provenance research and basin analysis. In our research, we present a brief introduction to the procedure, methods, and results of the collection and summarization of an updated detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology database for the Qilian-Qaidam-Kunlun collage in northern Tibet. A total of 620 samples with 59830 lines of raw data were compiled, including 70 samples with in-situ detrital zircon Lu-Hf isotopes. Samples from 7 different geologic sub-units are briefly categorized and primarily discussed to highlight characteristic age spans, probability density distributions, major peaks, and εHf(t) values for sediments with different depositional ages. Its detailed raw data will be periodically accessible in the Deep-Time Digital Earth repository. Traditional data processing and visualization techniques might readily ignore internal variations in possible source regions with the accumulation of detrital zircon age data. This study further synthesizes these metadata collections using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test and multidimensional scaling (MDS) statistical analysis. Combined with the detrital zircon age facies for discriminating and comparing multiple samples, we hope to provide new constraints on the provenance analyses, crustal evolution, tectonic history, and supercontinent reconstructions of the Qilian-Qaidam-Kunlun collage, the northern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.