The eastern part of the Erzgebirge region hosts an exceptional abundance of greisen- and vein-hosted Li-Sn-(W) deposits (e.g., the Zinnwald-Cínovec district), located across the eastern part of Germany and the northwestern part of Czech Republic. However, only a few of those deposits have been reliably age-dated (e.g., the Sadisdorf district), leaving the timing of hydrothermal mineralization on the regional scale widely unconstrained.
Here, we report new U-Pb LA-ICP-MS ages of cassiterite from Li-Sn-(W) mineralization at Zinnwald, Altenberg, Niederpöbel, Schmiedeberg, Bärenfels, Lauenstein and Krupka. The new ages of the different localities span between 315.1±3.7/4.4 and 306.6±1.5/3.5 Ma. Therefore, greisen- and vein-hosted cassiterite ages constrain hydrothermal mineralization's timing, on a regional scale, to a narrow time window of ~10 Ma years and are significantly younger than previously proposed ages between 325 and 318 Ma. The new ages are consistent with recent zircon ages of (sub-)volcanic rhyolite units (315 to 313 Ma), which are the host rocks of some of the Li-Sn-(W) granites. Greisen formation and associated cassiterite crystallization thus temporally coincides with the formation of the 315-310 Ma ring dykes linked to the collapse of the Altenberg-Teplice caldera.