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Arid Land Geography ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (3): 814-825.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000-6060.2021.384

• Earth Surface Process • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Extraction, identification and paleoclimatic significance of clay minerals: A case of the Huaitoutala section in Qaidam Basin

BAO Jing1(),YE Chengcheng2,LI Bingshuai1   

  1. 1. School of Earth Sciences, East China University of Technology, Nanchang 330013, Jiangxi, China
    2. School of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, China
  • Received:2021-08-29 Revised:2021-12-05 Online:2022-05-25 Published:2022-05-31

Abstract:

Clay minerals in sedimentary rocks are authigenic and detrital clay minerals. The authigenic clay minerals with small content are generated in a sedimentary environment as the product of sedimentary recycling or diagenesis and can be used as an indicator of some aspects of the sedimentary environment, whereas the detrital clay minerals are generated from weathering of source rocks and are less affected by the sedimentary environment. Thus, the detrital clay minerals can represent the chemical weathering of the source area and reflect the paleoenvironment change. Recently, these clay minerals have been used to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental changes of the source area. The extraction and identification of clay minerals are deemed difficult. Moreover, they can be affected by the grain sizes of sediments, depositional environment change, and diagenetic metasomatism. Therefore, we should carefully select the extraction method of clay minerals and consider the effect of origin and sedimentary environment changes, as well as the diagenesis process when using them to reconstruct paleoclimate changes. In this study, we present the extraction and identification process of silicate clay minerals and discuss its implications in reconstructing the paleoenvironment, in which we use the Huaitoutala profile in the northeastern Qaidam Basin of the northeast margin of the Tibetan Plateau in China, as an example, to provide a reference for further studies of clay minerals.

Key words: clay mineral, paleoclimate, chemical weathering, Qaidam Basin