Quantifying Continental Crust Thickness Using the Machine Learning Method

Abstract

In addition, crustal thickness through time in the continental crust can be used to track changes in global or regional scale tectonic settings Tang, Ji, et al., 2021). Although present crustal thickness is well constrained from oceanic regions (5-10 km) to continental orogens (over 70 km, such as in the Himalaya-Tibet) (Laske et al., 2013), quantifying crustal thickness in the geologic past remains challenging.Proxies used to calculate crustal thickness include maximum Ce/Y in basalts (Mantle & Collins, 2008), Sr/Y and (La/Yb) N of intermediate rocks (Chapman et al., 2015;F. Y. Hu et al., 2017;Profeta et al., 2015) and europium anomalies (Eu/Eu*) in detrital zircons (Tang, Ji, et al., 2021). These proxies are all calibrated by correlations between the geochemical indices of young magmatic rocks and geophysically determined crustal thickness.