Abstract:Low-temperature thermochronology not only is a geochronological tool to date a rock but also can provide valuable information about its thermal evolution. Accordingly, this technique has been widely used to solve the geological problems including surface processes, rock exhumation, or faulting in shallow crust, topographic relief evolution etc. This paper first briefly reviews the principles of low-temperature thermochronometries such as (U-Th)/He and fission track analysis, focusing on its geological interpretations on tectono-thermal history. Then the physical conditions of regional geothermal field and its influences on the interpretation of low-temperature thermochronometers are discussed. The main part of this paper discusses the basic methods to constrain the exhumation rate based on low-temperature thermochronological data, including (1) the age-closure temperature method using the relationship between the cooling age and the closure temperature; (2) the thermal history modeling method based on the annealing or diffusion models; (3) the mineral-pair method dating a same sample by multiple thermochronometers with different closure temperatures; and (4) the age-elevation relationship method extracting exhumation rate by the linear relationship of the ages and elevation data of a series of samples collected from a near-vertical profile. Although the above methods prove to be powerful in estimating the rock exhumation rate, there are some uncertainties in age measurements, modeling and geothermal field, which pose challenges for a more accurate quantification of exhumation rate.