Oblique collision at about 1.1 Ga along the southern margin of the Kaapvaal continent,south-east Africa

The 1.1 Ga Natal Metamorphic Province (NMP) lies at the heart of a world-wide system of Grenville age mobile belts which welded early continental fragments into the Mesoproterozoic supercontinent of Rodinia. Structural analysis of the three tectonostratigraphic terranes in Natal reveals a kinematic history characterized by prolonged NE-SW plate convergence, manifested as early thrust tectonics and later pervasive sinistral transcurrent shearing. Consequently, superimposed on the Natal tectonostratigraphic terranes is a kinematic subdivision into tectonic domains which are characterized by shallow, south-west dipping foliations, south-west plunging stretching lineations and north-east verging recumbent folds, and by younger domains with subvertical shear fabrics, subhorizontal to oblique lineations and folding about near-vertical axes. Microtextural and petrographic analyses suggest that the later shearing took place under high temperature conditions of at least 500°C. The recorded kinematic indicators suggest that early subhorizontal compressional tectonics gave rise to tectonic thickening of the crust, progressively followed by oblique transcurrent shearing within a transpressional regime. The shearing event in the southern arc-related terranes was associated with the widespread emplacement of late kinematic rapakivi granite -charnockite plutons, with A-type granite geochemical characteristics. This orogenic event took place around 1100 Ma during prolonged NE-SW collisional convergence along the southern margin of the stable Archean foreland, which lay to the north.     

北喜马拉雅地区下白垩统海底扇沉积环境

北喜马拉雅地区早白垩世沉积以碎屑岩为主，海底扇沉积十分发育。根据沉积岩的矿物成分、结构、构造和产状特征，可将这些海底扇分为6个亚相。根据亚相在空间的排列组合所指示的沉积环境，海底扇的发展过程可划分为萌芽、青春、成熟和消亡四个阶段。在早白垩世早、中期海底扇处于萌芽阶段和青春阶段，沉积岩的砂/?泥比值高，砂岩的矿物成分和结构多样，反映出海岸平原和大陆架较窄，海底坡度较大，从早白垩世开始沉积环境经历了由陆棚向大陆斜坡转移的过程，海平面升高，构造性质主要为水平拉张、裂陷。早白垩世晚期海底扇处于成熟阶段，海岸平原和大陆架宽度加大，砂/?泥比值降低，沉积物以泥质组分为主，富含菱铁矿、钙质结核，少见菊石等生物化石，相变缓慢，水体低能，属于缓倾斜、无明显坡折带的陆缘，反映了北喜马拉雅区的最大海侵事件。由于印度洋扩张、印度板块向北漂移，在早白垩世晚期北喜马拉雅被动陆缘已趋成熟，本区处于大陆斜坡下部强还原的深海-半深海环境。晚白垩世总体上属于海退，海底扇处于消亡阶段，其岩石由泥岩类向砂岩类直至砾岩类演化。白垩纪沉积盆地则相应经历了由陆棚→拉张断陷盆地→陆坡→深海盆地的演变。     

全球应力场与构造分析

介绍了近年来全球构造应力研究方面的一些新进展并以“世界应力图”提供的资料为背景 ,结合一些最新的研究成果 ,阐述了全球构造应力场的分布特征及其与板块构造运动之间的联系。研究结果表明 :(1)全球存在大尺度的统一性构造应力场 ;(2 )全球大多数板块内部地区为挤压应力作用 ,其应力结构多为逆断型、走滑型或逆走滑型 ;(3)大陆板块内部的扩张区大多位于高海拔异常地区 ,其应力结构为正断型或正走滑型 ,如青藏高原、东非裂谷和贝加尔裂谷等 ;(4)全球大部分地区的地壳上部构造应力作用方向较为均一 ,存在区域统一应力场 ;(5 )全球大部分地区的最大水平主应力方向与板块绝对运动 (角速度 )迹线保持较好的一致性 ,反映出构造应力与板块运动的关系密切 ;(6 )板块汇聚、洋脊扩张可能是产生岩石圈上部构造应力的主要力源。     

Unstable forearc stress in the eastern Nankai subduction zone for the last 2 million years

Transpressional tectonics characterizes the SW Japan arc. However, we will show in this article that offshore seismic profiles and onshore mesoscale faults indicate that the eastern part of the forearc was subject to transtensional tectonics since ca. 2.0 Ma. Offshore normal faults imaged on the profiles run parallel to the Nankai Trough, and started activity at 1.0 Ma, but transtensional tectonics commenced the onshore area earlier. In order to understand the stress history in the forearc region, we collected fault-slip data from onshore mesoscale faults in Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary rocks in the Kakegawa area at the northeastern extension of the offshore normal faults. Most of the mesoscale faults are oblique-normal, indicating that the area was subject to transtensional tectonics. The faults suggest that the compressional tectonic regime was followed by the transtensional one at 2.0 Ma, in agreement with regional tectonostratigraphic data, which indicate that folding ceased at that time. Present compressional stress followed the transtensional tectonic regime sometime in the late Pleistocene. Transtensional or extensional tectonic zone shifted from the Kakegawa area to the offshore region.These observations indicate that the state of stress just behind the accretionary prism of the eastern Nankai subduction zone has been unstable in the last 2 million years, suggesting that the forearc wedge has been at critical state in that gravitational force and basal shear traction on the wedge have been balanced, but the forearc tectonics has been susceptible to small perturbations. Possible factors compatible with the observed stress history include the change of subduction direction of the plate at 1.0 Ma, and the rapid uplift of Central Japan thereafter.     

Structure and evolution of an obliquely sheared continental margin: Rio Muni, West Africa

Oblique-shear margins are divergent continental terrains whose breakup and early drift evolution are characterized by significant obliquity in the plate divergence vector relative to the strike of the margin. We focus on the Rio Muni margin, equatorial West Africa, where the ca. 70-km-wide Ascension Fracture Zone (AFZ) exhibits oblique–slip faulting and synrift half-graben formation that accommodated oblique extension during the period leading up to and immediately following whole lithosphere failure and continental breakup (ca. 117 Ma). Oblique extension is recorded also by strike–slip and oblique–slip fault geometry within the AFZ, and buckling of Aptian synrift rocks in response to block rotation and local transpression. Rio Muni shares basic characteristics of both rifted and transform margins, the end members of a spectrum of continental margin kinematics. At transform margins, continental breakup and the onset of oceanic spreading (drifting) are separate episodes recorded by discrete breakup and drift unconformities. Oceanic opening will proceed immediately following breakup on a rifted margin, whereas transform and oblique-shear margins may experience several tens of millennia between breakup and drift. Noncoeval breakup and drift have important consequences for the fit of the equatorial South American and African margins because, in reconstructing the configuration of conjugate continental margins at the time of their breakup, it cannot be assumed that highly segmented margins like the South Atlantic will match each other at their ocean–continent boundaries (OCBs). Well known ‘misfits’ in reconstructions of South Atlantic continental margins may be accounted for by differential timing of breakup and drifting between oblique-shear margins and their adjacent rifted segments.     

Optimization with the Gradual Deformation Method

Building reservoir models consistent with production data and prior geological knowledge is usually carried out through the minimization of an objective function. Such optimization problems are nonlinear and may be difficult to solve because they tend to be ill-posed and to involve many parameters. The gradual deformation technique was introduced recently to simplify these problems. Its main feature is the preservation of the spatial structure: perturbed realizations exhibit the same spatial variability as the starting ones. It is shown that optimizations based on gradual deformation converge exponentially to the global minimum, at least for linear problems. In addition, it appears that combining the gradual deformation parameterization with optimizations may remove step by step the structure preservation capability of the gradual deformation method. This bias is negligible when deformation is restricted to a few realization chains, but grows increasingly when the chain number tends to infinity. As in practice, optimization of reservoir models is limited to a small number of iterations with respect to the number of gridblocks, the spatial variability is preserved. Last, the optimization processes are implemented on the basis of the Levenberg–Marquardt method. Although the objective functions, written in terms of Gaussian white noises, are reduced to the data mismatch term, the conditional realization space can be properly sampled.     

大陆板块俯冲和折返的同位素地球动力学

大别 -苏鲁造山带是扬子大陆板块与华北大陆板块之间在三叠纪时期俯冲 -碰撞所形成的超高压变质带。对该带超高压变质岩的稳定同位素研究发现 ,不仅含柯石英榴辉岩出现局部氧同位素负异常 (δ18O =- 10‰ ) ,而且区域上存在氧同位素分布的不均一性 (δ18O =- 10‰～+10‰ )。前者要求榴辉岩原岩在变质前经历过大气降水热液蚀变 ,说明俯冲板块具有大陆地壳特点 ;后者反映扬子板块具有快速俯冲变质的特征 ,否则将达到同位素均一化。榴辉岩氧同位素负异常的保存显示 ,这些超高压变质岩与地幔之间没有发生显著的化学相互作用。因此 ,载有榴辉岩原岩的板块俯冲到 2 0 0多公里深的地幔内部时 ,超高压岩石形成后在地幔中的滞留时间很短(<10Ma) ,致使它们与地幔之间的氧同位素交换没有达到再平衡。榴辉岩中不同矿物对氧同位素测温不仅给出了相互一致的结果 (6 5 0～ 75 0℃ ) ,而且这些温度与阳离子交换温度计的结果 (6 0 0～80 0℃ )相一致。因此 ,在榴辉岩相变质温度下共生矿物之间的氧同位素平衡已被“冻结” ,岩石冷却过程中的氧同位素交换再平衡没有发生 ,从而证明超高压榴辉岩在变质作用后经历了快速降压/冷却过程 ,对应于板块的快速抬升。这些结果首次从地球化学角度证明了大陆板块俯冲—超高压变质—折     

Geochemical and Nd, Sr Isotopic Study of the Post-Orogenic Granites in the Yidun Arc Belt of Northern Sanjiang Region, Southwestern China

Abstract: In the arc (basin)–back area of the Yidun arc belt in the north segment of the Sanjiang tectonic zone, southwestern China, there occurs a post‐orogenic granite belt extending for more than 300 km in NNW direction. It strides across two different tectonic units of the arc (basin)–back area and the subduction area, and is accompanied by extensive Ag‐Sn polymetal–lic mineralizations. More than ten granite bodies have very similar geochemical characteristics: high SiO₂ (73.8–76.3 wt%) and K₂O+Na₂O (7.16‐8.41 %), and low Al₂O₃ (11.9–13.6 %), CaO (0.46‐1.54 %) and MgO (0.16‐0.61 %), as well as high enrichment of Nb, Ta, Ga and Y, and strong depletion of Sr and Eu. Most of these features are peculiar to A‐type granite. Rb‐Sr and ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar isotopic dating results indicate that the formation ages of the granites decrease from 103.7 Ma of the north end to 75.2 Ma near the south end, and that the magmatism became younger from north to south. The tectonic environment analysis clearly reveals that they were formed in post‐orogenic within–plate extension settings. The magma genesis was controlled by a united crustal extension regime after the arc‐continent collision. The granites have low _Nd values ranging from –4.96 to –8.40, whereas the _Sr values vary greatly ranging from –31.7 to 296, reflecting that the source composition transited from mantle – differentiated igneous rocks in the north to basement – dominated metamorphosed sedimentary rocks in the south. Under high temperature and water‐absent conditions, the anatexes of the crustal rocks made a great amount of plagioclase separated from melts and left in magma sources. Through this mechanism, the post‐orogenic granites took geo‐chemical characteristics such as low Al₂O₃ and CaO, and strong depletion of Sr and Eu.     

Geodetic control on recent tectonic movements in the central Mediterranean area

During the Neogene and Quaternary, the western Mediterranean geodynamics was apparently dominated by the nearly eastward migration of the Apenninic arc and the associated opening (spreading) of the back-arc basin (Tyrrhenian Sea). However, during the last 5 My, the collision of the arc with the Apulian platform led to a dramatic change in the tectonic setting of the area. As geological processes require a long period of time to register the displacements of the different blocks, it is indispensable to take into account the present-day motion given by space geodesy data analysis in order to better constrain the geological models.Geodetic motions were derived from Global Positioning System (GPS), Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations collected from different networks. All the geodetic solutions have been computed and combined at the Centre of Space Geodesy (CGS), at Matera, Italy.The geodetic results show a NNE motion of the Adriatic plate with a small component of counter-clockwise rotation, in good agreement with the geological and geophysical observations.In the southern Tyrrhenian area, the lengthening of the Matera–Cagliari baseline should imply that convergence cannot be considered as the driving mechanism for the Apenninic subduction process. The estimated motion of Noto is in quite good agreement with the estimated motion of the African plate.     

长江中游区域性暴雨发展机理合成分析

利用高分辨TBB资料、逐6h NCEP/NCAP再分析资料和逐日降水资料及SCSMEX降水加密观测资料，通过对长江中游8次区域性暴雨的合成分析，研究发现：暴雨落区发生在急流出口区南侧与南亚高压脊线近极地一侧之间发散气流辐射加强的区域附近；且与东亚副热带地区季风涌相关联；高空非地转惯性平流风散度是高空总散度的主要贡献者，高空倾斜急流轴（NW－SE向）出口区水平风场的分布不均匀，导致其出口区的右侧产生较强的辐散场，由于对流风的作用，低层辐合会对高层辐散产生响应，从而诱发暴雨发生。高空急流轴倾斜以及急流出口区右侧强辐散场的出现要早于暴雨的发生。