Rapid drift of the Tethyan Himalaya terrane before two-stage India-Asia collision

Jie Yuan; Zhenyu Yang; Chenglong Deng; Wout Krijgsman; Xiumian Hu; Shihu Li; Zhongshan Shen; Huafeng Qin; Wei An; Huaiyu He; Lin Ding; Zhengtang Guo; Rixiang Zhu

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwaa173

Rapid drift of the Tethyan Himalaya terrane before two-stage India-Asia collision

Natl Sci Rev. 2020 Jul 27;8(7):nwaa173. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwaa173. eCollection 2021 Jul.

Authors

Jie Yuan¹, Zhenyu Yang², Chenglong Deng¹, Wout Krijgsman³, Xiumian Hu⁴, Shihu Li¹, Zhongshan Shen¹, Huafeng Qin¹, Wei An⁴, Huaiyu He¹, Lin Ding⁵, Zhengtang Guo⁶, Rixiang Zhu¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Lithospheric Evolution, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
² College of Resources, Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing 100048, China.
³ Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht HD 3584, The Netherlands.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Mineral Deposits Research, School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210029, China.
⁵ College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
⁶ Innovation Academy for Earth Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.

Abstract

The India-Asia collision is an outstanding smoking gun in the study of continental collision dynamics. How and when the continental collision occurred remains a long-standing controversy. Here we present two new paleomagnetic data sets from rocks deposited on the distal part of the Indian passive margin, which indicate that the Tethyan Himalaya terrane was situated at a paleolatitude of ∼19.4°S at ∼75 Ma and moved rapidly northward to reach a paleolatitude of ∼13.7°N at ∼61 Ma. This implies that the Tethyan Himalaya terrane rifted from India after ∼75 Ma, generating the North India Sea. We document a new two-stage continental collision, first at ∼61 Ma between the Lhasa and Tethyan Himalaya terranes, and subsequently at ∼53-48 Ma between the Tethyan Himalaya terrane and India, diachronously closing the North India Sea from west to east. Our scenario matches the history of India-Asia convergence rates and reconciles multiple lines of geologic evidence for the collision.

Keywords: India-Asia collision; North India Sea; Tethyan Himalaya terrane; two-stage continental collision.