Geochemical and detrital zircon U-Pb geochronological constraints on provenance of the Xiaomei red earth sediments (Bose Basin, Guangxi Province, southern China)

The Bose Basin in southern China is within a region influenced by the winter westerly monsoon and, thus, potentially subject to eolian dust accumulation. A red earth sequence developed on terraces of the Youjiang River (a branch of the Pearl River) records information about climate variation during the Pleistocene and its relationship to contemporaneous global climate changes. In this study, geochemical characteristics and U-Pb geochronology of detrital zircons of the red earth sequence at Xiaomei were investigated using X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS), and detrital zircon U-Pb dating analyses. Our results show that the red earth sediments are composed of quartz and clay minerals (kaolinite, illite, and mixed-layer illite/vermiculite) with minor hematite and goethite. Mobile elements such as CaO, MgO, Na2O, K2O, Sr and Ba are depleted and immobile elements such as TiO2, Al2O3, Fe2O3(t) and Zr are enriched in comparison with loess-paleosols of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), the upper continental crust (UCC), and post-Archean Australian shale (PAAS). These data indicate that the Xiaomei red earth sediments have experienced intense chemical weathering, similar to that of the Xuancheng and Jiujiang red earth sections on the middle to lower reaches of the Yangtze River. The Xiaomei sediments have similar La/Th ratios, U/Pb vs. Th/Pb relationships, and rare earth element (REE) distributions to the CLP, UCC, and PAAS, and their low εNd(0) values are indicative of an upper crustal origin. The 147Sm/144Nd and 87Sr/86Sr ratios of the Xiaomei sediments are different from loess-paleosols of the CLP but similar to those of well-mixed river sediments. U-Pb dating of detrital zircons in the Xiaomei sediments shows that crystals from different units have slightly different age distributions. The full Xiaomei section yields a distribution similar to that of Upper Permian-Triassic clastic rocks in the Youjiang area, and the distribution of the middle to upper Xiaomei section additionally shows similarities to upper crust of the South China Craton. Our results indicate that the Xiaomei red earth sequence, which dates to the late Early to early Middle Pleistocene (~1.0–0.6Ma), accumulated predominantly from fluvially transported, locally weathered materials and, therefore, that the sediment-carrying capacity of the East Asian winter monsoon has been overestimated in previous provenance studies of red earth sediments in South China.