Late Mesozoic slump beds found in Lingshan Island and a pilot research on the regional tectonics Lu Hongbo(1,2), Wang Jun(1,2), Zhang Haichun(2,3) (1) Department of Earth Sciences, China University of Petroleum (Qingdao, 266555) (2) State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy (Nanjing, 210008) (3) Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nanjing, 210008) Abstract: Lingshan Island, the highest island in northern China, is situated in the nearshore water to the southeast of Jiaonan City, Qingdao, Shandong Province, China. The island is among the Sulu Orogenic Belt between the South China Block and North China Block. Although the island is very important on the regional tectonics, its major geologic facts are seldom shown so far in the geological literatures. The authors of this paper investigated the island and found the distal turbidites and interbedded slump deposits in the Mesozoic clastic rocks. The horizon has been treated, in the geologic map, as the Laiyang Formation, the lowermost formation in the Cretaceous. However, the deposits might be formed in Jurassic according to pollen analysis. The slump structures are mainly synsedimentary slump folds, containing other synsedimentary deformation structures, such as synsedimentary boudinages, synsedimentary stretching lineations and synsedimentary duplexes. The slump structures indicate that the slump sediments were transported from southeast to northwest. The graded intervals of the rhythmites are mainly fine sands to silts and the mud intervals are black shales, showing the characteristics of distal turbidites in a remnant ocean basin between South China Block and the North China Block. The X-type shear jointing, normal to the sedimentary beds, indicates that the horizon was compressed in SE—NW direction before they were folded tectonically. The asymmetric folding structures of the horizon suggests that the South China Plate was subducting toward northwest under the North China Plate after the slump beds settled down in the Mesozoic time. Although the exact age of the slump beds is still unavailable, the distal turbidites and the synsedimentary slump structures found in Lingshan Island are valuable data for tectonic research on the evolution history in the Sulu Orogenic Belt between South China Block and North China Block. Key words: Lingshan Island, Late Mesozoic, distal turbidites, slump deposits, synsedimentary structures, remnant ocean basin, Sulu Orogenic Belt