Old detrital AFT ages from E. Greenland do not require plateau erosion

Abstract

Accurate estimates of past topography are required to reliably reconstruct past ice sheets to infer paleoclimate. For this reason, understanding erosion rates across East Greenland is crucial to constrain landscape evolution driven by tectonics and climate-dependent erosion rates. Here we analyse published apatite fission track (AFT) data to constrain the spatial pattern of AFT bedrock ages across the landscape. We compare these bedrock ages with published detrital distribution to highlight ambiguity in the pattern of erosion. In contrast to earlier work, we regress a simple model of exhumation pace through the bedrock ages such that age can vary both as a function of elevation and position. The resulting iso-age surfaces enable us to determine potential source areas for detrital AFT ages distributions. We find that old ages observed in detrital distributions are just as likely to be sourced from low-elevation locations that are far from the coast, as high elevation locations close to the coast. Additional data from lower temperature systems are thus required to make firm conclusions on landscape evolution in the region and distinguish between the two landscape-forming scenarios.