Lithospheric structure beneath the Qinling Orogenic Belt and its surrounding regions: Implications for regional lithosphere deformation

Abstract

The Qinling Orogenic Belt (QOB) is located between the North China Craton (NCC) and South China Block (SCB), and links the Dabie Orogenic Belt (DOB) in the east and Qilian-Kunlun Orogenic Belt in the west (Figure 1). It is one of the most important suture zones in eastern Asia, which experienced multi-episode ocean-continent subduction, continent-continent collision and intracontinental orogeny from the early Palaeozoic to the Mesozoic (Dong & Santosh, 2016; Dong et al., 2011). It is a widely studied region within the geoscience community for its complex lithosphere structure, multiphase tectonic evolution and rollback of the high and ultrahigh pressure (UHP) metamorphic rocks (

Historical earthquake records in the Weihe Basin, central China and new insights for geothermal genesis

“…As mentioned in Section 4, the abundance of normal faults in the subsurface of the Weihe Basin could serve as favorable pathways for fluid migration. The fracture zones containing fluids may also manifest as low resistivity bodies detected in geophysical observations (Zhao et al, 2021;Li et al, 2022;Liang et al, 2022;Yang et al, 2022). The correspondence between the thermal structure and lithospheric structure further substantiates the validity and reasonability of our analysis in this context.…”

“…Historical records of volcanic eruption in ancient and modern China (Chen and Chen, 2021) and active volcano lists in China (Xu et al, 2021) collectively disregard the existence of active volcanoes near the Weihe Basin. Indeed, geophysical observations have identified some low-velocity geological units beneath the Weihe Basin (Zhao et al, 2021;Li et al, 2022;Liang et al, 2022;Yang et al, 2022) that might potentially indicate magmatic activity (e.g., the occurrence of magma chamber). However, the absence of magma signature, for example, without a high 3 He/ 4 He value (Zhang et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2023), does not support the existence of magma chamber.…”

Present-Day Three-Dimensional Deformation across the Ordos Block, China, Derived from InSAR, GPS, and Leveling Observations

“…Thus, we contend that the crustal deformation data do not support the occurrence of processes associated with the lower crustal flow beneath the Qinling Orogen. Other studies, based on velocity structure analysis, suggest the existence of an asthenospheric mantle flow channel with an eastward flow of material beneath the Qinling Orogenic Belt, located between the rigid blocks of the Ordos and Sichuan basins [28,[40][41][42][43][44]. These studies propose that the direction of the asthenospheric mantle flow may deviate from that of the overlying lithosphere.…”