Electrical resistivity structures between the Northern Qilian Mountains and Beishan Block, NW China, and tectonic implications

Abstract

Controversies exist on the tectonic models at the northern margin of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. New magnetotelluric (MT) data, with a bandwidth of 0.001–5827.5s, were collected along one profile starting from the Northern Qilian Mountains in the southern end, crossing the Hexi Corridor, the Kuantan Shan-Hei Shan uplift, the Huahai Basin, and coming into the Beishan Block. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) resistivity models of the data are derived using magnetotelluric inversion codes. The 2D models, and the electrical structures along the profile extracted from the 3D models, are comparable and complementary in defining reliable scales and shapes of anomalies in electrical resistivity. The crust-upper mantle structures beneath the northern plateau are characterized by two imbricated southward underthrusted blocks of continental crust or lithosphere. The Northern Qilian Fault is interpreted as a gently south-dipping décollement in the upper crust along the top of a high resistivity body below the Northern Qilian Mountains. The two high resistivity bodies below the Kuantan Shan-Hei Shan uplift are disconnected; the upper crustal one may connect with the high resistivity basement below the Northern Qilian Mountains in that the attitudes and deformations of the strata at these areas are coherent; whereas the lower crust-upper mantle one may be the cold lithospheric materials of the block north to the Hexi Corridor and that forms a south-dipping boundary between the Hexi Corridor and its northern neighbors. The observed high electrical resistivity beneath the Beishan Block provides further support for the notion that the Beishan Block should be rigid as a whole; only in this manner could it transfer stress from south to north. The northern boundary of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is below the Kuantan Shan-Hei Shan Fault and underthrusting of continental crust or lithosphere is the main cause for the thickening of the plateau crust in the north.