Thermochronology is a technique that permits the extraction of information about the thermal history of rocks. It is based on the interplay between the accumulation of a daughter product produced through a nuclear decay reaction in the rock (whether this daughter product be an isotope or some sort of structural damage to the mineral lattice) and the removal of that daughter product by thermally activated diffusion. Because temperature increases with depth in the Earth's lithosphere, this temperature information can be translated into structural information – thermochronological data thus contain a record of the depth below the surface at which rocks resided at a given time. For eroding basement terrains, where rocks have been brought to the surface from depths of several to several tens of kilometres, thermochronology is the only technique that will provide such information and permit one to constrain the timing of rock exhumation towards the surface quantitatively.

However, the relationships among vertical motions, temperature history and the accumulation of daughter product (the present-day abundance of which will provide a thermochronological age) are highly non-linear and depend on many parameters. To the Earth scientist seeking to constrain geological history, this presents a dichotomy. On the one hand, such thermochronological datasets have the potential to offer insight into how parameters that influence the thermal history of a geological sample vary over time.