Formation of Hengchun Accretionary Prism Turbidites and Implications for Deep-water Transport Processes in the Northern South China Sea
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We thank the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) for providing geological data and borehole samples from the northern South China Sea.Meng Xianbo,Ren Hailing and Zhou Junshen kindly provided us with help for the field trip.Constructive and careful reviews by two referees are gratefully appreciated.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos 42076066, 92055203 and 41874076),the National Science and Technology Major Project of China (grant no. 2016ZX05026004-002),the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no.2018YFE0202400).Susan Turner (Brisbane) assisted with English language.

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    Abstract:

    Located at the end of the northern Manila Trench,the Hengchun Peninsula is the latest exposed part of Taiwan Island,and preserves a complete sequence of accretionary deep-sea turbidite sandstones.Combined with extensive field observations,a ‘source-to-sink’approach was employed to systematically analyze the formation and evolutionary process of the accretionary prism turbidites on the Hengchun Peninsula.Lying at the base of the Hengchun turbidites are abundant mafic normal oceanic crust gravels with a certain degree of roundness.The gravels with U-Pb ages ranging from 25.4 to 23.6 Ma are underlain by hundreds-of-meters thickness of younger deep-sea sandstone turbidites with interbedded gravels.This indicates that large amounts of terrigenous materials from both the‘Kontum-Ying-Qiong’River of Indochina and the Pearl River of South China were transported into the deep-water areas of the northern South China Sea during the late Miocene and further eastward in the form of turbidity currents.The turbidity flow drastically eroded and snatched mafic materials from the normal South China Sea oceanic crust along the way,and subsequently unloaded large bodies of basic gravel-bearing sandstones to form turbidites near the northern Manila Trench.With the Philippine Sea Plate drifting clockwise to the northwest,these turbidite successions eventually migrated and,since the Middle Pleistocene,were exposed as an accretionary prism on the Hengchun Peninsula.

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CUI Yuchi, SHAO Lei, YU Mengming, HUANG Chiyue.2021. Formation of Hengchun Accretionary Prism Turbidites and Implications for Deep-water Transport Processes in the Northern South China Sea[J]. Acta Geologica Sinica(),95(1):55-65

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History
  • Received:May 22,2020
  • Revised:November 27,2020
  • Adopted:
  • Online: February 19,2021
  • Published: