A >300 Myr Long‐Lived Topographic Highland Along the Northern North China Craton Margin Driven by Multistage Continental Convergence

Topographic highlands commonly develop along convergent plate boundaries through long-term processes such as subduction and continental collision. However, the pre-Cenozoic mountain-building history of deep-time orogenic systems in northeastern Pangaea remains poorly constrained due to later tectonic overprinting and denudation. Here we present detrital zircon U–Pb–Hf data to reconstruct the Phanerozoic provenance and exhumation of the northern North China Craton (NCC). Our results indicate that the Inner Mongolia Paleo-uplift of northern NCC margin was the primary source of Late Paleozoic–Mesozoic sediments in the region. Integrated with crustal thickness estimates, thermal histories, and paleogeographic reconstructions, our results demonstrate >300 Myr of continuous exhumation along the northern NCC margin, defining it as a long-lived topographic highland. We attribute this protracted uplift to the successive closure of the Paleo-Asian and Mongol–Okhotsk oceans, which maintained a convergent tectonic regime in the northeastern Pangaea.