Northward expansion of the West Kunlun orogenic belt during the Cenozoic and its implications for the evolution of the northwest Tibetan Plateau: Constraints from sediment dispersal patterns in the Buya Basin, China

Abstract

The West Kunlun orogenic belt, which defines the northwestern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, holds important information on plateau growth. Despite its significance, views about its uplift history continues to be under debate, with two competing hypotheses involving episodic uplift or northward expansion, related to a fixed or movable plateau boundary, respectively. The Buya Basin, a small basin located between the North and South Kunlun terranes, is key to understanding the Cenozoic uplift history of the West Kunlun orogenic belt. In this study, we conducted sedimentary and detrital zircon UPb geochronological analyses on the Cenozoic sediments of the Buya Basin. According to the findings of the sedimentary investigation, the Cenozoic strata of the basin generally show gradual changes from low- to high-energy deposition interrupted by a reverse trend in the Anjuan Formation. Moreover, the detrital zircon UPb geochronological results indicate that the Buya Basin received sediments initially from the Songpan–Ganzi and South Kunlun terranes during the deposition of the Keziluoyi to Pakabulake formations and then from the South and North Kunlun terranes during the deposition of the Artux Formation. This change in sediment dispersal patterns demonstrates that the uplift of the West Kunlun orogenic belt has expanded northwards to the North Kunlun terrane, which suggests that the northwestern boundary of the Tibetan Plateau has been a northward-moving feature in the context of India–Eurasia convergence. Along with previous studies, we suggest that the northward expansion of the northwest Tibetan Plateau is accommodated by decoupling deformation along the southern Tarim Basin, with northward thrusting of the foreland fold-and-thrust belts in the upper crust and southward underthrusting in the lower plate.