UNCOVERING HIDDEN PROVENANCE SIGNALS USING DETRITAL RUTILE: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON DATA WORKFLOWS

Sedimentary provenance is a powerful tool for reconstructing convergent margin evolution. Yet popular single mineral approaches, like detrital zircon, have struggled to track sediment input from mafic and metamorphic sources. Sediment input from these lithologies is especially critical for reconstructing orogenic settings dominated by terrane accretion, ophiolite obduction, and forearc inversion. Rutile forms in metamafic and metapelitic rocks and its U-Pb age and geochemistry often record the most recent metamorphic event, thus detrital rutile offers a path forward in sedimentary provenance reconstructions when metamorphic terranes are potential source regions. However, U-Pb geochronology in rutile can be difficult due to low uranium concentration and high discordance. Here, we present detrital rutile U-Pb geochronology and trace element geochemistry results from the Late Cretaceous to Eocene Central Sakarya and Saricakaya Basins in Anatolia to reconstruct provenance during Neotethys orogenesis. We present a new workflow that accounts for low-U rutile and is based on common Pb corrections. Furthermore, we test the sensitivity of resulting U-Pb age spectra to Pb correction methods and to discordance filters, and determine whether these factors alter the overall provenance interpretation. This new dataset highlights the limitations of U-threshold filtering as low-U rutile are numerous and diagnostic of specific metamorphic source units. Overall, this new dataset demonstrates that detrital rutile captures sediment input from metamafic and metapelitic units that are poorly resolved in the detrital zircon record. Therefore, the detrital rutile workflow and result presented herein provide an exciting path forward in orogenic settings and are relevant to convergent margins worldwide.