Patterns of cooling in basement rocks - A bootstrap method to measure anomalous spatial dispersion of zircon fission-track ages

Abstract

Thermochronology depends on isotopic systems for which the age is related to the time that a specified mineral cooled through its closure temperature. In tectonic studies, it is often of interest to examine regional variations in cooling age. When the variation in age within a data set exceeds the analytical errors on the age determinations, many options are available to model the spatial variation in age and to correlate it with other data or with the predictions of hypotheses. For example, trend surfaces [e.g. Davis J.C. (1986) Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York] could be used to explain the variation that exceeds experimental error. In the case of interest i..