Asthenospheric flow and lithospheric erosion driving the outward growth of the northeastern Tibetan Plateau.

Chutian Shu¹, Xiaoping Long², Stephen F Foley³, Kaizhang Yu⁴, Zhuoying Zhang⁵, Zheng-Xiang Li⁶, Luc S Doucet⁷, Qiang Xu⁸

¹School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney 2109, Australia; State Key Laboratory of Continental Evolution and Early Life, Department of Geology, Northwest University, Xi'an 710069, China; Earth Dynamics Research Group, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Perth 6845, Australia; Earth Evolution and Dynamics Research Center, Laoshan Laboratory, Qingdao 266237, China.

²State Key Laboratory of Continental Evolution and Early Life, Department of Geology, Northwest University, Xi'an 710069, China. Electronic address: longxp@nwu.edu.cn.

³School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney 2109, Australia; Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra 2601, Australia.

⁴State Key Laboratory of Geological Processes and Mineral Resources, School of Earth Sciences, China University of Geoscience, Wuhan 430074, China.

⁵CAS Key Laboratory of Crust-Mantle Materials and Environments, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.

⁶Earth Dynamics Research Group, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Perth 6845, Australia; Earth Evolution and Dynamics Research Center, Laoshan Laboratory, Qingdao 266237, China.

⁷Earth Dynamics Research Group, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Perth 6845, Australia.

⁸Key Laboratory of Continental Collision and Plateau Uplift, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.

PubMed DOI

Abstract

The northeastern (NE) Tibetan Plateau is extruding eastward at a rapid rate (∼15 mm a-1), but the role of the upper mantle in this process remains unclear. Early-Miocene primary melilitites from the leading edge of the extruding plateau provide critical insights into the upper mantle dynamics. Geochemical and Sr-Nd-Pb-Os isotopic data, supported by experimental melt comparisons, reveal that these…

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