TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hansman, Reuben J.
A1  - Ring, Uwe
A1  - Thomson, Stuart N.
A1  - den Brok, Bas
A1  - Stuebner, Konstanze
T1  - Late Eocene Uplift of the Al Hajar Mountains, Oman, Supported by Stratigraphy and Low-Temperature Thermochronology
JF  - Tectonics
N2  - Uplift of the Al Hajar Mountains in Oman has been related to either Late Cretaceous ophiolite obduction or the Neogene Zagros collision. To test these hypotheses, the cooling of the central Al Hajar Mountains is constrained by 10 apatite (U-Th)/He (AHe), 15 fission track (AFT), and four zircon (U-Th)/He (ZHe) sample ages. These data show differential cooling between the two major structural culminations of the mountains. In the 3km high Jabal Akhdar culmination AHe single-grain ages range between 392 Ma and 101 Ma (2 sigma errors), AFT ages range from 518 Ma to 324 Ma, and ZHe single-grain ages range from 62 +/- 3Ma to 39 +/- 2 Ma. In the 2 km high Saih Hatat culmination AHe ages range from 26 +/- 4 to 12 +/- 4 Ma, AFT ages from 73 +/- 19Ma to 57 +/- 8 Ma, and ZHe single-grain ages from 81 +/- 4 Ma to 58 +/- 3 Ma. Thermal modeling demonstrates that cooling associated with uplift and erosion initiated at 40 Ma, indicating that uplift occurred 30 Myr after ophiolite obduction and at least 10 Myr before the Zagros collision. Therefore, this uplift cannot be related to either event. We propose that crustal thickening supporting the topography of the Al Hajar Mountains was caused by a slowdown of Makran subduction and that north Oman took up the residual fraction of N-S convergence between Arabia and Eurasia.
KW  - thermochronology
KW  - Oman
KW  - uplift
KW  - mountains
KW  - fission-track
KW  - (U-Th)
KW  - He
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1002/2017TC004672
SN  - 0278-7407
SN  - 1944-9194
VL  - 36
SP  - 3081
EP  - 3109
PB  - American Geophysical Union
CY  - Washington
ER  -