Collaborative Research: Exhumation of the Colorado Plateau - Spatial and Temporal Distribution and Implications for Landscape Evolution

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The investigators in multidisciplinary collaborative project are examining the Tertiary exhumation history of the Colorado Plateau and adjacent southern Rocky Mountains. The goals of this work are to understand the thermal history of rocks of the Colorado Plateau region, and how these rocks came to be at near-surface levels. Together with simple calculations of how the Colorado Plateau landscape has been eroded, the thermal history of the rocks is being used to constrain the surface uplift history of the Colorado Plateau. This project relies on rock exhumation recorded in the thermal and geologic history of the Colorado Plateau region. The thermal history is reconstructed from two techniques that record the low-temperature (less than 110 deg C) cooling of rocks, fission-track annealing and the relative abundance of uranium, thorium, and helium inside minerals such as apatite. The project involves creating a Geographic Information Systems database (to be shared with the scientific community) of the rock exhumation and erosion data. These data are used in a preliminary modeling effort to study the implications of our data for the uplift history of the Colorado Plateau and southern Rocky Mountains. This research is providing new products that may be used in educational displays at National Parks across the Colorado Plateau.