Sediment compositions in offshore southern Taiwan and their relations to the source rocks in modern arc-continent collision zone

Development of arc–continent collision mélanges: Linking onshore geological and offshore geophysical observations of the Pliocene Lichi Mélange, southern Taiwan and northern Luzon arc, western Pacific

“…This slumping can transport materials (including fossils and oceanic crust pieces) from shallow to deep water. Such slumping can occur along the east flank of the prism (Yen and Lundberg, 2006), and also the flank of the Huatung ridge as shown in the side-scan sonar data documented in this work. An advancing thrust sheet that supplies olistostromes in basins has been described by Yilmaz and Maxwell (1984) for the Antalya complex, Turkey.…”

“…The steepened bathymetric slope due to the faulting also encourages slumping, as imaged by the seismic profile in Fig. 5B and by the core analyses by Yen and Lundberg (2006). The faulting and slumping work together to exhume and mix the materials (Fig.…”

Distribution and Characters of Gas Hydrate Offshore of Southwestern Taiwan

“…Sedimentation in the slope basins has continued throughout uplift of the anticlinal ridges, resulting in formation of asymmetrical wedges of growth strata that are imaged as progressively tilted reflectors on seismic profiles . Modal analyses of sand samples from piston cores collected off SW Taiwan confirm that the major sediment input to the accretionary wedge province is from Taiwan, dominated by sedimentary lithic fragments and lowgrade metamorphic lithic fragments, though in the main depocenter (i.e., the Manila Trench and adjacent South China Sea basin), minor but important amounts of sediment come from China (Yen and Lundberg 2006). West of the deformation front, Pleistocene-Quaternary sediment of the China continental margin form the uppermost part of the South China Sea shelf and slope.…”

Geological controls on BSR occurrences in the incipient arc-continent collision zone off southwest Taiwan

“…The above diagenetic transformation is likely to occur in siliceous sediments of biogenic origin (e.g., oozes, Kastner et al, 1977) and therefore this type of BSR is reported to exist in passive continental margins with slow rate of sedimentation (e.g., Berndt et al, 2004;Lee et al, 2003). The study area off SW Taiwan is characterized by rapid sedimentation with large amounts of orogenic detritus (Yen and Lundberg, 2006) derived from the rapidly denudating Taiwan island (Dadson et al, 2003) and systematic analyses of seafloor sediments found no siliceous ooze (Jiang et al, 2006) in both regions of the accretionary wedge and adjacent South China Sea continental slope. For this reason we believe that the observed BSRs reported in this study are caused by free gas at the base of the GHSZ rather than diagenetic-related BSRs.…”