Quartz Thermoluminescence—Another Potential Paleo‐Thermometer for Studies of Sedimentary Basin Thermal History

Abstract

AbstractGood reproducibility of quartz thermal stimulated luminescence phenomenon offers the possibility of dating geological events in the subsurface and exploring environmental temperature history. As sandstones in basins generally experienced one certain pattern of thermal history due to effects of temporal and spatial dependent temperature fields, the quartz minerals extracted from these sandstones can be evaluated to explore the thermal regime structure information by thermoluminescence analyzing technique. In terms of equivalence for certain burial depths in the petroleum basin, the mean quantitative temperature field was investigated using both the quartz thermoluminescence apparent age method and laboratory isothermal thermoluminescence simulation measurements. The result shows that the variations of both thermoluminescence glow‐curve pattern and intensity of certain natural thermoluminescence peaks correlate well with the environmental temperature field at corresponding burial depths where the quartz grains were extracted. The quartz natural thermoluminescence glow‐curves peaks shift to high temperature and the thermoluminescence intensity reduction results from the increase of both environmental temperature and burial time for quartz due to deepening burial depth. Both the additive dose thermoluminescence (TL) and isothermal TL (SA‐ITL) techniques were used for quartz mineral TL dating and the resultant apparent ages agree well with each other, and thus one parameter called equivalent temperature was tentatively presented and deducted from apparent TL ages of quartz minerals to evaluate the basin's thermal regime structure. Quartz thermoluminescence signal can be recognized as one potential paleothermometer if the good correlation of calculated equivalent temperature of buried quartz mineral with other paleothermometers can be supported by more lines of future independent geological evidence.