Professor Tian Yuntao’s team reported a new progressive tectonic model for explaining the formation of the southeast Tibetan Plateau

Source: School of Earth Sciences and Engineering

Edited by: Zheng Longfei, Wang Dongmei

The Tibetan Plateau, the highest and largest orogenic plateau on the planet Earth, was mainly formed by the Cenozoic collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates after a series of Paleozoic-Mesozoic closure of ocean basins and subsequent collisions of continental blocks, providing a natural laboratory to understand the geodynamic processes of continental collision. The southeast Tibetan Plateau is considered as a crucial area to accommodate the post-collision deformation through large-scale escape of crustal materials and reactivation of pre-existing fault zones (e.g., the Ailaoshan-Red River shear zone). The development of the southeast Tibetan Plateau is thought to have strongly influenced the evolution of the Asian monsoon and proposed to be kinematically linked with the opening of the South China sea.

Existing end-member models sparked debates concerning plateau formation in the southeast Tibetan Plateau through early-middle Cenozoic transpressional and shortening deformation or late Cenozoic regional lower crustal flow with limited crustal shortening. The models, however, remain controversial. Cenozoic magnitude of shortening recorded by folding of Cretaceous-Paleogene basins is limited at an order of