Ophiolitic rocks in the southeastern part of the Zagros Orogenic Belt can be separated from southwest to northeast, into two groups: the Neyriz ophiolites and the Naien–Shahrebabak–Baft ophiolites. The southeast sector of Sanandaj-Sirjan wasdelimited by the two nearly synchronous ophiolitic belts in its southwestern and northeastern margins. In this study, new ophiolitic formation models were u...

The Qinling orogen (Fig. 1) extends for over 2000 km across central China, separating the Archean and Proterozoic Sino-Korean block in the north from the Proterozoic Yangtze block in the south. Although the orogen has been recognized as a continental collision zone for some time, the nature, age, and duration of the collision have been the subject of considerable debate (see review in Hacker et...

Orogenic gold de pos its are char ac ter ized by struc tur ally con trolled, low-sul phide quartz veins that formed prox i mal to deep-crustal faults in greenschist-fa cies meta mor phic ter ranes. These de pos its, pre vi ously re ferred to as mesothermal, greenstone-hosted, shear-hosted and turbidite-hosted de pos its, have a wide range of as so ci ated min er al iza tion styles and as so ci ...

M. Mange Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PR, England Abstract This integrated study of the sedimentology, magnetostratigraphic chronology and petrography of the mostly continental clastics of the Oligocene to Miocene Swiss Molasse Basin underpins a reconstruction of facies architecture and delineates relationships between the depositional evolution o...

The dynamic system of tectonics and erosion contains important feedback mechanisms such that orogenic systems tend toward a steady state. This concept is often invoked, but the nature of the steady state is commonly not specified. We identify four types of steady state that characterize the orogenic system and illustrate these cases by using numerical-model results and natural examples. These t...

A compilation of magnetic data acquired during the past three decades for a region in central Saudi Arabia where Precambrian basement is partly exposed on the Arabian shield and partly concealed by overlying Phanerozoic strata, shows a central sector of conspicuous N-S-trending anomalies, a heterogeneous western sector of short-wavelength, high-intensity anomalies, and an eastern sector of lowt...

Focused groundwater discharge in closed basins provides opportunities to investigate mechanisms for closing hydrologic and solute budgets in arid regions. The Salar de Atacama (SdA), adjacent to the Central Andean Plateau in the hyperarid Atacama Desert, provides an extreme example of halite (>1800 km) and lithium brine (~5000 ppm) accumulation spanning late Miocene to present. Minimum long-ter...

The Ordovician radiation of marine life was among the most substantial pulses of diversification in Earth history and coincided in time with a major increase in the global level of orogenic activity. To investigate a possible causal link between these two patterns, the geographic distributions of 6576 individual appearances of Ordovician vician genera around the world were evaluated with respec...

The geological complexities of contractional orogenic belts have been studied for two centuries, yet our understanding of them is still rapidly changing. Most mountain belts form at or near the active edges of continents and/or fringing island arcs. Virtually all result from consumption of lithospheric plates, involving the underflow of oceanic crust, and the consequent transport and descent of...