Himalayan cross faults affect thrust sheet geometry: An example from the Munsiari thrust sheet near the Gish Transverse fault zone, frontal Darjiling Himalaya, India

Abstract

The Munsiari thrust (MT) sheet is a dominant thrust sheet in the Himalaya and forms the frontal ridge in the Gorubathan recess of the Darjiling Himalaya. The geometry of the MT sheet in the recess was poorly constrained thereby inhibiting the understanding of how the geometry and kinematics of the sheet varied from the Nepal to the Bhutan Himalaya. We present new structural data and infer the deformation mechanisms and the geometry of the MT sheet in the Gorubathan recess in the Darjiling Himalaya to fill this knowledge gap. The MT sheet was dominated by large-scale, overturned antiforms and synforms. The entire MT sheet was later folded to a north-easterly plunging synformal fold with NE-SW axial trend due to the effect of a Himalayan cross fault in the region named the Gish Transverse fault. A new brittle, out-of-sequence and neotectonically active, Phaparkheti thrust, was recognized in the MT sheet. Deformation microstructures indicate that the temperature of deformation in the MT fault zone and the sheet was ~500 °C to 700 °C and ~400 °C, respectively. Our approach of first mapping major and minor structures and then integrating these studies with deformation microstructure and tectonic geomorphology data resulted in an improved understanding of the structural characteristics of the MT sheet in the Darjiling Himalaya. Our study also suggests that there is considerable variation in the geometry and kinematics of frontal thrust sheets along the Himalayan arc that must be studied systematically in the context of Himalayan salients and recesses.