“…The Central Asian Orogenic Belt (CAOB; Figure 1a), the largest Phanerozoic accretionary orogenic belt in the world (Xiao et al, 2014), is composed of abundant island arcs, accretionary wedges, ophiolites, back‐arc basins, oceanic arcs, and ancient continental blocks (Eizenhöfer & Zhao, 2018; Glorie et al, 2019; Vrublevskii, Nikiforov, Sugorakova, & Kozulina, 2020; Wang et al, 2020; Xiao et al, 2015; Xiao et al, 2020; Zhao et al, 2018; Zheng, Li, Zhang, Xiao, & Li, 2019; Zheng, Zhao, & Yang, 2019). The CAOB is characterised by the coexistence of young orogenic belts and old micro‐continents.…”