The enigmatic geodynamic processes involved in the India-Asia collision shape our understanding of uplift and deformation Tibetan Plateau subsequent changes land-sea distribution pattern, monsoon-arid environments biotic evolution Central-Eastern Asia. However, current models dealing with history exhibit significant discrepancies how, when where exactly India Asia occurred. Recently, we propose...

Arc continent collision is one of the most fundamental tectonic processes for the formation of new land, and the preservation on land of fragments of oceanic lithosphere (ophiolites). However, the tectonic evolution of arc continent collision is commonly over-simplified in everything from introductory textbooks to complex tectonic models. Major unresolved issues include the response of the fore...

Abstract Orogenic belts have been thought to form through plate convergence, involving subduction of oceanic lithosphere at continental margins (accretionary orogens), which may ultimately lead ocean closure and continent-continent collision (collisional orogens). Intraplate orogens away from known, but the mechanisms controlling their evolution are poorly understood. The South China craton, in...

In contrast to continent/continent collision, arc-continent collision generates very short-lived orogeny because the buoyancy-driven impedance of the subduction of continental lithosphere, accompanied by arc/suprasubduction-zone ophiolite obduction, is relieved by subduction polarity reversal (flip). This tectonic principle is illustrated by the early Ordovician Grampian Orogeny in the British ...

Exhumation has been recognized as an important problem in tectonics and can be achieved by normal faulting, ductile thinning, and erosion. The exhumation of ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) rocks is the most challenging and least understood aspect of the exhumation problem. In this review, we focus on a variety of geologic settings with the goal of characterizing exhumation rates and maximum depths of ...

The northward subduction and subsequent exhumation of the Sulu ultrahigh-pressure metamorphism terrane exposes a tilted coherent crustal section of the overriding North China Block (NCB), providing an opportunity to study three-dimensional structures of the subduction/collision process. Detailed geological mapping and structural measurements on the Liaodong peninsula, located at the southern ma...