Marginal basin evolution: the southern South China Sea

Crust and upper mantle structure and its tectonic implications in the South China Sea and adjacent regions

“…Unlike the thick crust beneath the southern Sunda Shelf, there is a distinct Moho uplift below the northern Sunda Shelf and southern Indochina. This feature obviously contradicts with the widespread assumption that the Sunda Shelf is a uniform and long-term stable region (e.g., Hutchison, 2004), which has been doubted previously from several individual aspects (Hall, 2002;Hall and Morley, 2004). Moreover, it seems that the Moho uplift connects with the SCS in the east and Andaman Sea in the west, and can be further traced along the Sagaing Fault, and north to the border between Burma and India.…”

Oligocene–Miocene carbonates in the Reed Bank area, South China Sea, and their tectono-sedimentary evolution

“…A Paleozoic and/or Mesozoic basement may be inferred based on dredge samples and limited wells. The sampled rocks show a close affinity to those of Southeast Asia, suggesting that the Reed Bank area once was a part of the South China Continent (Hutchison 2004;Kudrass et al 1986;Yan and Liu 2004). After a Cretaceous to Late Paleogene period of rifting, which led to the formation of numerous NE-SW trending half-grabens, the continental fragments were finally separated from the South China continent by seafloor spreading Hayes 1983, Taylor andHayes 1983;Briais et al 1993).…”

The role of rifting in the development of the continental margins of the southwest subbasin, South China Sea: Insights from an OBS experiment

“…In the continental margins of the SWSB, a highly attenuated crust and an ultra-wide rift half graben/half host structure was the result of progressive stretching with additional regional extension events occurring along different segments of the rift grabens and basins from the late Eocene to the middle Oligocene . After the Dangerous Grounds had collided with Borneo in the middle Miocene (Hutchison 2004;Clift et al 2008;Cullen et al 2010;Hutchison and Vijayan 2010), the stress dominant setting of the southern margin changed into a compression. There are several basement high features around the SWSB, including the Macclesfield Bank, Reed Bank, Zhongjian Massif and Zhenghe Massif.…”

“…The horizon T80 is a regional unconformity distributed in the half graben/half host in the Zhenghe Massif of the southern margin. It resulted from the tectonic subsidence of the Xiwei movement (~38Ma) in the SCS, but also corresponds to the Sarawak movement in the southern margin (Hutchison 2004;Yao et al 2012).…”