GEOLOGIC INTERPRETATION OF DETRITAL ZIRCON U-PB DATA: ASSESSING THE EFFECT OF DISCORDANCE FILTERING APPROACHES ON KERNEL DENSITY ESTIMATES

Detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology is a powerful tool for assessing tectonic and sedimentary histories, including dating strata, reconstructing basins, determining terrane provenance, and understanding orogenesis. Detrital zircon studies can have large datasets, that may include analyses of varying geologic significance. A major challenge in the geologic interpretation of detrital zircon U-Pb data is adequately separating meaningful signal from background noise. Various treatments exist for filtering detrital zircon U-Pb data, including trace element and U-Pb screening metrics aimed at reducing spurious correlations resulting from multi-zonal sampling or geochronologically compromised samples, in addition to ascertaining statistically significant populations. However, the effect of these different treatments on geologic interpretation is an area in need of further understanding and possible redundancies have not been thoroughly explored. Here we present results from a large (n=4,915) detrital zircon U-Pb study and evaluate the effect of different filtering approaches on age spectra, specifically the importance of discordance filtering on the performance of kernel density estimate approaches to identifying significant detrital zircon U-Pb populations.