Thermochronological Methods

Book excerpt: Thermochronology - the use of temperature-sensitive radiometric dating meth-ods to reconstruct the thermal histories of rocks - has proved to be an important means of constraining a wide variety of geological processes. Fission track and (U-Th)/He analyses of apatites, zircons and titanites are the best-established methods for reconstructing such histories over time scales of millions to hun-dreds of millions of years. The papers published in this volume are divided into two sections. The first sec-tion on 'New approaches in thermochronology', presents the most recent ad-vances of existing thermochronological methods and demonstrates the progress in the development of alternative thermochronometers and modelling tech-niques. The second section, 'Applied thermochronology', comprises original papers about denudation, long-term landscape evolution and detrital sources from the European Alps, northwestern Spain, the Ardennes, the Bohemian Massif, Fenno-scandia and Corsica. It also includes case studies from the Siberian Altai, Mozam-bique, South Africa and Dronning Maud Land (East Antarctica) and reports an ancient thermal anomaly within a regional fault in Japan.