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Present-Day Crustal Deformation Within the Western Qinling Mountains and Its Kinematic Implications

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Abstract

The western Qinling Mountains, located between the East Kunlun fault and the West Qinling fault, hold the key to investigating the outward expansion of the Tibetan Plateau. We use up-to-date GPS observations to derive high spatial–temporal resolution crustal velocity and strain rate fields for this region. Our results suggest that a series of NEE-trending faults bounding the eastern margin of the western Qinling Mountains experience right-lateral strike slip with low rates of ~ 1 mm/yr. In addition, our results suggest that crustal deformation of the western Qinling Mountains could be governed by a right-lateral shear zone trending NNE at a rate of ~ 6 mm/yr, producing a clockwise rotation of subblocks: left-lateral and right-lateral strike slip on the NWW-trending and NEE-trending faults, respectively. The eastward extrusion of the Tibetan Plateau along the western Qinling Mountains is limited further east. In contrast, the NNE-ward expansion of the northeastern Tibetan Plateau is the primary motion which extends through the western Qinling Mountains and the Longxi block. The results of this study improve our understanding of the outward expansion of the Tibetan Plateau influenced by the Indian–Eurasian collision.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation and the Gansu Bureau of Surveying Mapping and Geoinformation for sharing a part of the GPS data used in this study. We also thank all the crew of the CMONOC project for their hard work. We sincerely thank two anonymous reviewers and the Associate Editor Prof. Jeff Gu for their constructive comments and suggestions. This work was supported by grants from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1500102), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41874017, 41874117), the Science for Earthquake Resilience (XH19067Y), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0901), and the Guangdong Province Introduced Innovative R&D Team of Geological Processes and Natural Disasters around the South China Sea (2016ZT06N331). The GPS velocity solution is provided as supplementary material and archived at the Harvard Dataverse Web site (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5X9OXQ), separately.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Second Monitoring and Application Center, China Earthquake Administration, Xi’an, 710054, China

    Ming Hao, Yuhang Li, Qingliang Wang & Wenquan Zhuang

  2. Southern Laboratory of Ocean Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory, Zhuhai, 519082, China

    Ming Hao

  3. College of Geology Engineering and Geomatics, Chang’an University, Xi’an, 710054, China

    Wei Qu

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  1. Ming Hao
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Hao, M., Li, Y., Wang, Q. et al. Present-Day Crustal Deformation Within the Western Qinling Mountains and Its Kinematic Implications. Surv Geophys 42, 1–19 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-020-09621-5

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