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Rifting to drifting transition of the Southwest Subbasin of the South China Sea

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Abstract

Continental rupturing process and related dynamics on the onset of seafloor spreading remain poorly understood in the opening of the South China Sea. To constrain the timing and cause of major tectonic events, we focus on the rifting-to-drifting transition of the Southwest Subbasin, which has very wide extended continental margins. By carefully interpreting rifting structures and carbonate platforms and reefs, we distinguished two major unconformities, i.e., the breakup unconformity (BRU) and the mid-Miocene unconformity, in the two conjugate margins of the Southwest Subbasin. The age of the BRU in our study area is near the Oligocene/Miocene boundary (~23 Ma). Pre-stack depth migration of a recently acquired multichannel reflection seismic profile reveals complex structures and strong lateral velocity variations associated with a 3.5 km thick syn-rifting sequence developed right at the continent-ocean boundary (COB) of the Southwest Subbasin. This syn-rifting sequence is bounded landwards by a large seaward dipping fault, and tapers out seawards. An erosional truncation, which represents the mid-Miocene unconformity landwards but the older breakup unconformity on the seaward side, occurred at the top of this sequence. The overall transitional deformation style from the rifting to drifting suggests a successive episode of rifting, faulting, compression, tilting, and erosion at the COB during the crustal thinning and mantle upwelling. Localized thick syn-rifting deposition and early deposition beneath the BRU in the oceanic domain exist only at the seaward concave part of the COB, indicating discrete rifting and seafloor spreading prior to the buildup of a unified spreading center for the entire subbasin.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. Jiabiao Li for coordinating the acquisition of marine geophysical data of line NH973-1 using R/V “Tanbao” of Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey (GMGS). Critical but constructive comments from Hans Christian Larsen and Weiwei Ding have helped greatly in improving this paper. We also thank the officers and crew of R/V “Tanbao” for their contributions. Data processing is also supported by GMT (Wessel and Smith 1995) and Seismic Un*x (Cohen and Stockwell 2012). This research is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 91428309 and 91028007).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, People’s Republic of China

    Taoran Song & Chun-Feng Li

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Song, T., Li, CF. Rifting to drifting transition of the Southwest Subbasin of the South China Sea. Mar Geophys Res 36, 167–185 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11001-015-9253-0

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