Jurassic sedimentary features and tectonic settings of southeastern China

Two types of the Jurassic basins are distinguished in SE China based on their geodynamic features: the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic post-orogenic basins and the Middle Jurassic intra-continental extensional basins. The Lower Jurassic sequence shows a change from coarse- to fine-grained accumulation, suggesting a gradually deepening depositional environment from river to shore-lake and to deep-water lake. In contrast, the Middle Jurassic accumulation was changed from claystone to conglomerate along the coastal provinces in SE China, indicative of an initial crustal uplift. The Wuyi Mountains have been a paleogeograghic separating zone since the Middle Jurassic. The Late Jurassic strata are absent in most areas of SE China. A large-scale bimodal intra-continental rift-type volcanism occurred during the Middle Jurassic along a 40–60 km wide and 200 km long area in western Fujian and southern Jiangxi provinces, which is most likely the strongest volcanism in SE China since the Cambrian. The SHRIMP zircon U-Pb analyses on the rhyolite from the Dongkeng basin in the southern Jiangxi area yield a concord U-Pb age of 160±0.5 Ma, providing an upper age limit for the bimodal volcanic eruption. The analyses of the basin features indicate a change of the depositional environment during the interval from Middle Triassic to Late Triassic from a shallow-sea to an intra-continent in SE China in response to the strong collision between the Yangtze and North China Blocks. Sedimentary structures record a southward direction of Early Jurassic paleo-currents, reflecting that their source areas were to the north side. We propose that the Wuyi region was uplifted as early as Middle Jurassic, followed by a wide E-W-trending extended depression and bimodal volcanism in the western foot of the Wuyi Mountains. Presumably the uplift of the Wuyi domain changed the Middle Jurassic paleogeographic outline and formed the transformational tectonic regime from compression to extension as a tectonic response to the Pacific plate subduction.