Cenozoic intracontinental dextral motion in the Okhotsk‐Japan Sea Region

Abstract

A right‐lateral shear zone trending northerly along more than 2000 km is recognized from central Japan to northern Sakhalin. It was active mainly during the Neogene and has accommodated several hundreds of kilometers of displacement. The whole structure of Sakhalin is built on this shear zone. En échelon sigmoidal folds and thrusts, en échelon narrow Miocene basins, and a major discontinuity which is observed along more than 600 km, the Tym‐Poronaisk fault, characterize the deformation there. In Hokkaido, en échelon folds and thrusts and a ductile shear zone with high‐temperature metamorphism constitute the southern extension of this transpressional shear zone. It continues to the south as a zone of transtensional deformation along the eastern margin of Japan Sea, as en échelon basins and dextral transfer faults observed as far south as Noto peninsula and Yatsuo basin. The style of the shear zone thus evolves from transpressional in the north far from the subduction zone, to transtensional in the south in the back‐arc region. Strike‐slip motion along this shear zone was primarily responsible for the dextral pull‐apart opening of Japan Sea during the early and middle Miocene. Dextral motion is still active in the north along the Tym‐Poronaisk fault in Sakhalin as well as on the continental margin of Japan Sea (Korea and Asia mainland). Active E‐W compression replaced the dextral motion along the eastern margin of Japan Sea in late Miocene time, and incipient subduction began in the early Quaternary.