Abstract
It is widely accepted that radiometric ages determined on metamorphic minerals from orogenic belts generally reflect their cooling history rather than their primary crystallisation. Armstrong (1966) first developed this concept in detail, while Harper (1967) pioneered its application to the British Caledonides. Its general acceptance, however, stems largely from the investigations of the Central Alps by Professor Jäger and her colleagues at Bern, reviewed elsewhere in this volume. In a young mountain belt the precision of some dating systems, notably Rb-Sr on biotite, K-Ar on biotites and muscovites, and U-fission tracks on apatite, is sufficient to build up a consistent picture of rocks cooling through a succession of different “blocking temperatures”, that is, temperatures at which the various systems start to retain their radiogenic daughter products. Above its blocking temperature each system appears to lose its daughter product completely, and below it the daughter product is quantitatively retained.
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Dodson, M.H. (1979). Theory of Cooling Ages. In: Jäger, E., Hunziker, J.C. (eds) Lectures in Isotope Geology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-67161-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-67161-6_14
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