Zircon U-Pb Chronology of the Nyingtri Group, Southern Lhasa Terrane, Tibetan Plateau: Implications for Grenvillian and Pan-African Provenance and Mesozoic-Cenozoic Metamorphism

The Nyingtri Group of the Lhasa terrane in southern Tibet consists dominantly of metasedimentary rocks and orthogneiss. These rocks have a similar mineral paragenesis of plagioclase + K-feldspar + biotite + quartz ± sillimanite ± garnet ± staurolite ± muscovite ± amphibole, indicating amphibolite-facies metamorphic conditions. Inherited detrital zircons from the metasedimentary rocks show magmatic features and yield widely variable 206Pb/238U ages ranging from 3300 to 50 Ma. The data define two prominent age populations, 1200–1000 and 600–500 Ma, indicating that the source of the Nyingtri Group preserves the records of both Grenville and Pan-African magmatic-thermal events. Inherited magmatic zircon cores from the orthogneiss yield a crystallization age of 496 Ma, limiting the depositional age of the metasedimentary sequence to Cambrian or older. Overgrowth rims on the detrital zircons from one metasedimentary rock yield a metamorphic age of 32 Ma. On the basis of these results, together with the regional comparison, we infer that the Nyingtri Group was formed during or before the Cambrian, with a potential provenance from the Pinjarra Orogen of Western Australia–East Antarctica. This rock group, together with the Tethyan Himalayan Sedimentary Sequence, represents an early Paleozoic sedimentary cover of the northern margin of the Gondwana supercontinent that was intruded by Cambrian granites during the circum-Gondwana Andean-type orogeny. Along with published data, this study demonstrates that the Nyingtri Group was metamorphosed during Mesozoic and Cenozoic, as against the previous notion of a Precambrian metamorphic basement for the Lhasa terrane.