Detrital apatite fission track constraints on Cenozoic tectonic evolution of the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China: Evidence from Cenozoic strata in Lulehe section, Northern Qaidam Basin

Du, Dingding; Zhang, Chengjun; Mughal, Muhammad Saleem; Wang, Xiaoyu; Blaise, Dembele; Gao, Junping; Ma, Yao; X, Luo

doi:10.1007/s11629-017-4692-5

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…It follows that either there was an Eocene uplift of the region or an upland derived from pre-Cenozoic terrane collisions already existed in the Eocene. An Eocene rise is consistent with thermochronological studies that indicate an Eocene exhumation/cooling in the nearby Beishan mountains (Cheng et al 2016;Qi et al 2016;Zhuang et al 2018), as well as numerous Eocene cooling ages derived from detrital thermochronological studies from the Qaidam Basin (Guan and Jian 2013;Du et al 2018;Jian et al 2018), Subei Basin (Li et al 2017a), Jiuquan Basin (He et al 2017) and Lanzhou Basin (Wang et al 2017c). Irrespective of whether the area rose in the Eocene, or much earlier, this high landscape in northern Tibet preceded the rise of the Himalaya.…”

Section: Northern Tibetsupporting

confidence: 84%

The topographic evolution of the Tibetan Region as revealed by palaeontology

Spicer

Valdes

et al. 2020

Palaeobio Palaeoenv

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The Tibetan Plateau was built through a succession of Gondwanan terranes colliding with Asia during the Mesozoic. These accretions produced a complex Paleogene topography of several predominantly east–west trending mountain ranges separated by deep valleys. Despite this piecemeal assembly and resultant complex relief, Tibet has traditionally been thought of as a coherent entity rising as one unit. This has led to the widely used phrase ‘the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau’, which is a false concept borne of simplistic modelling and confounds understanding the complex interactions between topography climate and biodiversity. Here, using the rich palaeontological record of the Tibetan region, we review what is known about the past topography of the Tibetan region using a combination of quantitative isotope and fossil palaeoaltimetric proxies, and present a new synthesis of the orography of Tibet throughout the Paleogene. We show why ‘the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau’ never occurred, and quantify a new pattern of topographic and landscape evolution that contributed to the development of today’s extraordinary Asian biodiversity.

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Section: Northern Tibetsupporting

confidence: 84%

The topographic evolution of the Tibetan Region as revealed by palaeontology

Spicer

Valdes

et al. 2020

Palaeobio Palaeoenv

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“…Importantly, this scenario suggests and predicts that more than half of the total Cenozoic shortening strain across the Qilian Shan occurred by the early Miocene. Eocene cooling ages across the central Qilian Shan (Qi et al, 2016;Jian et al, 2018;Du et al, 2018;Li et al, 2019) suggest local exhumation distributed across the region at this time. The Cenozoic Lulehe Formation of northern Qaidam Basin was sourced from the southern Qilian Shan and records the first clastic sedimentation derived from deformation-related uplift.…”

Section: Integrated Shortening Across the Qilian Shanmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…The Cenozoic Lulehe Formation of northern Qaidam Basin was sourced from the southern Qilian Shan and records the first clastic sedimentation derived from deformation-related uplift. It is traditionally assigned an early Eocene age (Yin et al, 2008b;Yu et al, 2017;Ji et al, 2017;Du et al, 2018;, although Wang et al (2017) recently suggested a ca. 25.5 Ma age for basal Lulehe strata.…”

Section: Integrated Shortening Across the Qilian Shanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underthrusting and duplexing beneath the northern Tibetan Plateau and the evolution of the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen

Zuza

Wang

et al. 2018

Lithosphere

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The Cenozoic Qilian Shan thrust belt is the northern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, which developed in part due to progressive India-Asia convergence during Himalayan-Tibetan orogeny. Available geologic observations suggest that this thrust belt started deforming shortly after initial India-Asia collision at 60-55 Ma, and thus its kinematic development is intrinsically related to the construction and evolution of the Tibetan Plateau. Here, we present new field observations from a geologic traverse across the Qilian Shan to elucidate the style of deformation across the active thrust belt. In particular, we infer protracted out-of-sequence deformation here that is consistent with this thrust system remaining a stationary northern boundary to the Tibetan Plateau since the early Cenozoic. We present a lithosphere-scale model for this region that highlights the following: (1) coupled distributed crustal shortening and underthrusting of the North China craton beneath Tibet, which explains the spatial and temporal distribution of observed crustal shortening and thickness, (2) this underthrusting exploited the south-dipping early Paleozoic Qilian suture paleo-subduction mélange channel, and (3) development of a lower-crustal duplex at the lithospheric underthrusting ramp. This last inference can explain the relatively high elevation, low relief, and thickened crust of the central Qilian Shan, as well as the comparative aseismicity of the region, which experiences fewer earthquakes due to less upper-crustal faulting. Both the northern and southern margins of the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen appear to have developed similarly, with continental underthrusting and crustal-scale imbrication and duplexing, despite vastly different climatic and plate-velocity boundary conditions, which suggests that the orogen-scale architecture of the thrust belt is controlled by neither of these forcing mechanisms. Instead, strength anisotropies of the crust probably control the kinematics and style of deformation, including the development of northern Tibet, where thrust systems are concentrated along pre-Cenozoic suture zones.

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“…Detrital fission-track dating can also be used to characterize variations in source terrane and has been regarded as a very important supplementary means of investigating changes in provenance for the Qaidam Basin (Du et al, 2018;Jian et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2017;. Detrital apatite fission-track data of the Cenozoic strata, especially the Lulehe Formation in the northern Qaidam Basin, show a prominent age population peak of 80-40 Ma (Du et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2017;Jian et al, 2018). This means that some of the Lulehe Formation sediments in the northern Qaidam Basin were most likely derived from Mesozoic strata in the northern Qaidam Basin margin, the detrital apatite fission-track ages of which range from 81 to 46 Ma ( Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a clarification of the provenance of Cenozoic sediments in the northern Qaidam Basin

Chen

et al. 2018

Lithosphere

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Determining the provenance of sedimentary basin fill in the northern Qaidam Basin is a key step toward understanding the sedimentary system dynamics and mountain-building processes of the surrounding orogenic belts in Tibet. The exceptionally thick (average of 6-8 km) Cenozoic fluvio-lacustrine deposits in the northern Qaidam Basin were once thought to have been eroded from the nearby northern Qaidam Basin margin and the southern Qilian Shan and to reflect the prolonged thrust-related exhumation of these orogenic belts. However, several recent studies, based mainly on paleocurrent and detrital zircon U-Pb age data, suggested that they were derived from the distant East Kunlun Shan to the south, or the Qimen Tagh to the southwest (at least 200 and 350 km from the northern Qaidam Basin, respectively). That model assumed that the East Kunlun Shan and Qimen Tagh formed significant topographic barriers during the earliest sedimentation of Cenozoic strata (e.g., the Lulehe Formation) in the northern Qaidam Basin. Therefore, the tectonic significance of the provenance of the Lulehe Formation remains a fundamental problem in understanding the postcollisional uplift history of the northern Tibetan Plateau. To address this issue, we conducted sedimentological and paleocurrent analyses of the Lulehe Formation and detrital zircon U-Pb dating of Mesozoic strata in the northern Qaidam Basin. The results, in combination with existing paleocurrent and seismic reflection data, collectively indicate that although the source area cannot be specified by matching zircon U-Pb ages in sedimentary rocks with crystalline basement source rocks, other evidence points consistently to a unified proximal northerly source area (the northern Qaidam Basin margin and the southern Qilian Shan). Our results emphasize that noncrystalline basement rocks (e.g., Mesozoic sedimentary rocks) in fold-and-thrust belts should be taken into consideration when seeking potential source areas by correlating zircon U-Pb ages of siliciclastic detritus with related basement rocks. In addition, this study strongly supports the claim that variations in the proportions of age populations should be used with caution when determining source terrane by comparisons of age distributions.

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Detrital apatite fission track constraints on Cenozoic tectonic evolution of the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China: Evidence from Cenozoic strata in Lulehe section, Northern Qaidam Basin

Cited by 17 publications

References 53 publications

The topographic evolution of the Tibetan Region as revealed by palaeontology

The topographic evolution of the Tibetan Region as revealed by palaeontology

Underthrusting and duplexing beneath the northern Tibetan Plateau and the evolution of the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen

Towards a clarification of the provenance of Cenozoic sediments in the northern Qaidam Basin

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