CaltechAUTHORS
Published February 2002 | Version public
Journal Article Metadata-only

Intracontinental subduction and Palaeozoic inheritance of the lithosphere suggested by a teleseismic experiment across the Chinese Tien Shan

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences

Abstract

Teleseismic tomography across the Chinese Tien Shan shows that seismic wave speeds in the lithosphere beneath central Tien Shan are high and therefore the lithosphere is not weaker than that beneath the adjacent undeformed Tarim and Junggar basins. There is evidence for significant velocity contrasts within the lithosphere that are presumably inherited from the Palaeozoic collision history. The high-velocity, thick Yili block observed underneath the northern Tien Shan is a clue for shortening by a intracontinental subduction. The observed geometry is consistent with a simple model of intracontinental subduction and suggests that, during orogeny, the lithosphere has remained heterogeneous and has deformed along existing planes of weakness rather than by homogeneous thickening of a particularly weak lithosphere.

Additional Information

© 2002 Blackwell Science Ltd. Received 8 March 2001; revised version accepted 6 December 2001. Article first published online: 28 Feb 2002. This work is part of the Lithoscope program funded by INSU-CNRS (France), ETH Zurich, CEA-LDG (France) and the Ministry of Land and Resources of China supported this project. We thank the Chinese team that participated in the field work. We thank Peter Molnar for his critical but helpful review.

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
33952
DOI
10.1046/j.1365-3121.2002.00391.x
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20120910-080944310

Related works

Describes
10.1046/j.1365-3121.2002.00391.x (DOI)

Funding

Institut national des sciences de l'Univers/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (INSU/CNRS) (France)
ETH Zurich
Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA)/LDG (France)
Ministry of Land and Resources of China

Dates

Created
2012-09-10
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-09
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Seismological Laboratory, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)