Refining exposure-age estimates of 40- to 800-ka surfaces with 10Be, 21Ne, and additional geologic constraints

Dating alluvial-fan or river-terrace surfaces that are more than several tens of kyr old is challenging in many environments. Depth profiles of samples can be difficult to extract in the field, time consuming to process in the lab, and expensive to analyze. Even under idealized sampling conditions, the difficulty of constraining possible surface erosion or inflation can lead to large uncertainties in the surface exposure age. Alternatively, sampling individual boulder surfaces or cobbles may be logistically simpler, but large scatter in ages can be difficult to explain, given the possibility that the boulders/cobbles have rotated from their original position, surfaces experienced erosion, or the clasts may have some inherited concentration of cosmogenic nuclides. All of these problems are exacerbated in surfaces that have been exposed for hundreds of kyr.

In the Toro Basin of NW Argentina, a set of alluvial-fan surfaces has recently been interpreted to comprise two generations, one likely spanning from ca. 500 to 800 ka, and another less than 100 ka, based on ¹⁰Be exposure ages of individual boulder surfaces and one depth profile. Here, we report ²¹Ne data from a subset of the boulder surfaces with the aim of better constraining the ages.

Despite the apparently simple geomorphic setting of the fans, dual-nuclide (“banana”) plots of ²¹Ne and ¹⁰Be data reveal that most of the boulders have a complex burial history, with inferred burial times up to ca. 750 kyr. This finding implies that the boulders were not simply transported from nearby bedrock hillslopes and exposed on the fan surfaces. Instead, the boulders must represent exhumed rocks from an earlier generation of basin filling, which is constrained to between 4.5 and 0.85 Ma in the vicinity of the fans from U-Pb zircon dating of intercalated ashes (Pingel et al., 2020). We use a Monte Carlo approach to explore what possible range of initial exposure times, burial times, and final exposure times are consistent with the ¹⁰Be and ²¹Ne data on any given surface. For several surfaces, parameters trade off such that a wide range of exposure ages is possible. However, if we also take into account the stratigraphic relationships among the surfaces (higher surfaces must be older), and we consider that boulders exposed in the highest surface must have burial times that are shorter than boulders exhumed from lower elevations, relatively tight constraints on exposure ages, inherited nuclide concentrations, and boulder-surface erosion rates are possible on some of the surfaces.