Recycled oceanic crust in the source of 90–40Ma basalts in North and Northeast China: Evidence, provenance and significance

The Subduction Factory: Geochemical perspectives

“…The results imply that the influence of Pacific plate subduction on the eastern Asian continent can be traced back at least to the Late Cretaceous. This supports that the Pacific subduction is a potential trigger of the destruction of the North China Craton (Niu, 2005;Sun et al, 2007a;Ling et al, 2013a;Xu, 2014).…”

“…Other studies suggest that dehydration fluids from the subducted/subducting Pacific plate (Niu, 2005), changes in subduction regime (Sun et al, 2007a), ridge subductions (Ling et al, 2013a), or subduction in general (Zhu et al, 2012a) caused the decratonization. Xu (2014) in this volume provides evidence for the involvement of recycled oceanic crust components in the source of intraplate basalts that were emplaced during 90-40 Ma in the north and northeast China. He argues that components derived from recycled oceanic crust may have been derived from stagnant Pacific slab within the mantle transition zone, which has been seismically detected (Kárason and van der Hilst, 2000;Wang and Chen, 2009;Li and Yuen, 2014).…”

“…1). This special issue on the Subduction Factory includes 16 papers on topics ranging from dehydration metamorphism (Gao et al, 2014;Tao et al, 2014), convergent margin magmatism (Kimura and Nakajima, 2014;Liu et al, 2014), and oxygen fugacity (Lee et al, 2014) to isotopes (Feng et al, 2014;Shen et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2014), recycling of subducted materials (Frezzotti et al, 2014;Xu, 2014;Yang et al, 2014;Xu et al, 2014b), growth of the continental crust , and the formations of mantle plumes Tatsumi et al, 2014) and carbonatite (Xu et al, 2014a).…”

Coexisting Early Cretaceous High-Mg Andesites and Adakitic Rocks in the North China Craton: the Role of Water in Intraplate Magmatism and Cratonic Destruction

“…From the late Paleoproterozoic ($1Á85 Ga) to the Paleozoic ($250 Ma) this block was stable without significant tectono-thermal events (except emplacement of minor Ordovician kimberlites) and was covered by a thick sequence of sediments. The NCC was affected by subduction and collision with surrounding blocks during Phanerozoic time (Windley et al, 2010), including the Paleozoic southward subduction of the Paleo-Asian oceanic plate (Xiao et al, 2003), the Triassic deep subduction of the Yangtze continental crust (Li et al, 1993) and the Mesozoic-Cenozoic (and still continuing) subduction of the (Paleo-)Pacific plate (Mü ller et al, 2008;Xu, 2014). As a result of the first two subduction and/or collision episodes, the NCC was amalgamated with the Siberian and South China blocks, leading to the formation of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt to the north and the Qingling-Dabie-Sulu Orogenic Belt to the south, respectively.…”

“…Therefore, we propose that destruction of the NCC was caused by erosion, replacement, modification or partial melting associated with the hydration of the lithosphere. A large amount of water was probably added to the lithospheric mantle during the multiple episodes of subduction that occurred around the eastern NCC since the early Paleozoic (Windley et al, 2010;Xia et al, 2013;Kusky et al, 2014), and especially the rapid, deep subduction of the paleo-Pacific (Izanaghi) plate underneath East Asia (Niu, 2005;Zhao et al, 2007;Xu et al, 2012;Zhu et al, 2012c;He, 2014;Xu, 2014). Rollback of the subducted paleo-Pacific slab during the early Cretaceous (Zhu et al, 2012a;Kusky et al, 2014) induced upwelling of the asthenosphere and vigorous convection, which could erode already refertilized lithospheric mantle within the mantle wedge (He, 2014), in association with widespread magmatism (e.g.…”