“…The easternmost extent of the mountain belt is located within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, terminating just short of the Mongolian border (Figure ). A multitude of low‐temperature thermochronological studies utilizing the apatite fission track (AFT) and/or (U‐Th)/He (AHe) systems have attempted to constrain the cooling history of the Tianshan, generally concluding that the onset of modern mountain building occurred at ~25–15 Ma in response to the India‐Eurasia convergence (Bande et al, ; De Grave et al, ; Dumitru et al, ; Glorie & De Grave, ; Glorie et al, ; Hendrix et al, ; Käßner et al, ; Macaulay et al, , ; Shen et al, ; Sobel, Chen, et al, ; Sobel & Dumitru, ; Wang, Li, et al, ). These Oligocene‐Miocene ages were mainly obtained for samples taken in the vicinity of the major fault zones and associated steep topography within the Tianshan in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and western Xinjiang.…”