Lead and Zinc of Afghanistan

Afghanistan sits on the junction between the Indo-Australasian and Eurasian crustal plates and is composed of a series of terranes (Figure 1) that broke away from the main Gondwana supercontinent before colliding with and being accreted on to the Eurasian plate. The accretionary events began in the Cretaceous and have continued until recent times. The Herat or Hari Rod fault, which runs E-W across central Afghanistan, marks the boundary between Eurasia to the north and the first of these accretionary terranes, the Farad block, to the south, the intervening Paleo-Tethys Ocean having been subducted under the Eurasian continent. The later collision of the Indo-Pakistan continent caused subduction of the Neo-Tethys Ocean and formed the Himalayan orogeny, which led to uplift of the Hindu Kush mountain range in Afghanistan.