The South China Sea is not a mini-Atlantic: plate-edge rifting vs intra-plate rifting |
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| Authors: | Pinxian Wang Chi-Yue Huang Jian Lin Zhimin Jian Zhen Sun Minghui Zhao |
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| Institution: | 1. State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China;2. Department of Earth Sciences, Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, China;3. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543-1050, USA;4. Key Laboratory of Ocean and Marginal Sea Geology, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510301, China |
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| Abstract: | The South China Sea, as ‘a non-volcanic passive margin basin’ in the Pacific, has often been considered as a small-scale analogue of the Atlantic. The recent ocean drilling in the northern South China Sea margin found, however, that the Iberian model of non-volcanic rifted margin from the Atlantic does not apply to the South China Sea. In this paper, we review a variety of rifted basins and propose to discriminate two types of rifting basins: plate-edge type such as the South China Sea and intra-plate type like the Atlantic. They not only differ from each other in structure, formation process, lifespan and geographic size, but also occur at different stages of the Wilson cycle. The intra-plate rifting occurred in the Mesozoic and gave rise to large oceans, whereas the plate-edge rifting took place mainly in the mid-Cenozoic, with three-quarters of the basins concentrated in the Western Pacific. As a member of the Western Pacific system of marginal seas, the South China Sea should be studied not in isolation on its origin and evolution, but in a systematic context to include also its neighboring counterparts. |
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| Keywords: | rifting marginal basin passive margin South China Sea Western Pacific subduction |
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