Antarctic cooling and exhumation at the continental scale: a review

Abstract

Antarctica preserves spatially heterogeneous thermochronological records shaped by cratonic inheritance, arc- and rift-related tectonism, magmatism, and ice-sheet-modulated surface processes. Existing studies, however, are unevenly distributed and remain largely regional in scope, limiting direct comparison at the continental scale. Here we compile and standardize zircon and apatite fission-track (ZFT, AFT) and (U-Th)/He (ZHe, AHe) data from bedrock, drill-core, and detrital samples to establish a pan-Antarctic thermochronological synthesis. In this synthesis, the dataset is grouped into the East Antarctic cratonic background domain, a transitional thermochronological response domain that includes the Transantarctic Mountains, Shackleton Range, and Ellsworth Mountains, and the composite thermally active West Antarctic domain.