The Punjab foreland basin of Pakistan: a reinterpretation of zircon fission‐track data in the light of Miocene hinterland dynamics

Sedimentary basins represent an archive of tectonic events of the hinterland source regions. By determining the variation in sediment lagtime over time, events can be distinguished which may no longer be available as the source has been eroded. In regions characterized by rapid exhumation this is most often the case but the erosion products form a record of these events. Detrital zircon fission‐track ages from sediments of the Siwalik basin, Pakistan, originally presented by Cerveny et al. ( New Perspectives in Basin Analysis , Springer‐Verlag, New York, 1988, p. 43), have been reinvestigated and reinterpreted using a revised methodological approach. Detrital age populations were determined from different stratigraphic levels and were correlated through time in order to assess the change in lag time over the stratigraphic section. This information was combined with the many new ages from the hinterland to further interpret events in the source region. The new investigation suggests that steady‐state evolution has not always existed. An overall trend of exhumation increasing by 0.1 mm Myr −1 (from 0.9 to 2.65 mm yr −1 ) from 18 Ma to the present is evident with a major exception of a net pulse between 11.7 and 10.9 Ma associated with an increase in sedimentation increasingly rich in hornblende. Earlier studies suggested that at this time the source of the sediments was the presently outcropping Kohistan Arc. We are able to demonstrate that this cannot be so but was rather the rapidly exhuming Nanga‐Parbat Haramosh syntaxis (> 2 mm yr −1 ) coevally with transpressional displacement along the Main Karakorum Thrust, whereby the overlying Kohistan Arc sequences were removed. Furthermore, comparison of our detrital thermochronological data set with another one from the same basin and one from another foreland basin to the east, in NW India suggest that the Himalayan orogenesis was probably not synchronous for the late Early–Middle Miocene. Overall, regions that undergoes today's rapid uplift may be useless to reconstruct earlier phases of exhumation as the levels that may have yielded such info were eroded and deposited into the adjacent basin(s). Such scenario is reproducible in most orogens as in the Himalaya in NW Pakistan stressing the high potential of detrital thermochronological studies to trace hinterland dynamics. Terra Nova, 18, 248–256, 2006