The discovery of the oldest rocks in the Kuluketage area and its geological implications

The basement rocks in the Kuluketage area are composed predominately of tonalite-trondhjemite-granodiorite rocks, and occured mainly in Xinger and Korla. U-Pb dating of TTG gneiss near Korla yielded a late Neoarchean weighted mean (207)Pb/(206)Pb age of 2.65 Ga, which is the oldest published age for the TTG rocks in the Kuluketage area and thus suggests that Archean terrane in the area was formed in the late Neoarchean. The Korla gneiss is much younger than the TTG rocks in the northern Altyn Tagh, eastern Tarim Craton, indicating that the oldest terrane of the Tarim Craton was exposed probably in the northern Altyn Tagh. Until late Neoarchean, the Tarim continent extends to the Kuluketage area and finally had generated a relatively large uniform Archean basement within the craton. Zircon Hf isotopic analyses of the TTG gneiss give low E >(Hf)(t) values (-5 to 1) with Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean two-stage model ages (T (DM) (2)) between 3.0 and 3.3 Ga, suggesting that the basement rocks in the northern Tarim Craton were derived dominately from partial melting of Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean juvenile crustal material. The Hf model ages, therefore, indicate that no continent crust older than 3.3 Ga existed in the Kuluketage area.