Quartz thermoluminescence-another potential paleothermometer for sedimentary basin thermal history study

Abstract

Good reproducibility of quartz thermal stimulated luminescence phenomenon offers the possibility of dating geological events in subsurface and exploring environmental temperature history as well. As sandstones in basins generally experience one certain pattern of thermal history due to effects of temporal and spatial dependent temperature field, the quartz minerals extracted from these sandstones were evaluated to explore the thermal regime structure information by thermoluminescence analyzing technique. The mean quantitative temperature field information in terms of equivalence for certain burial depths in petroleum basin was investigated using both quartz thermoluminescence apparent age method and laboratory isothermal thermoluminescence simulation measurements. It is recognized that: (1) the variations of both thermoluminescence glow-curve pattern and intensity of certain natural thermoluminescence peaks correlate well with environmental temperature field in corresponding burial depths where the quartz was extracted from. The quartz natural thermoluminescence glow-curves peaks shifting to high temperature and the thermoluminescence intensity reduction result from the increase of both environmental temperature and burial time for quartz due to deepening burial depth; (2) both the additive dose thermoluminescence (TL) and isothermal TL (SA-ITL) techniques were used for quartz mineral TL dating and the resultant apparent ages agree well with each other, and thus one parameter called equivalent temperature was tentatively presented and deducted from apparent TL ages of quartz minerals to evaluate the basin s thermal regime structure information. Quartz thermoluminescence signal can be recognized as one potential paleothermometer if the well correlation of calculated equivalent temperature of buried quartz mineral with other paleothermometers can be supported by more future independent geological evidences.