The early Paleozoic Wuyi–Yunkai orogeny in South China: a collisional orogeny with a major lag in time between onset of collision and peak metamorphism in subducted continental crust

Abstract

Collisional orogeny is characterized by deep subduction of continental crust and major crustal thickening, leading to high-pressure/high-temperature metamorphism and anataxis of the subducted continental crust. Since conductive heating of large slabs of cold, subducted continental crust is a slow process, heating up to a temperature that is high enough to generate significant partial melting can take tens of millions of years. Where the spatial and temporal relationships are obscured due to later modification (e.g., post-collisional rifting), the peak metamorphism and magmatism may be interpreted as an orogeny that is separate from the collision, or may be interpreted as an intraplate orogeny as no contemporaneous arcs or ophiolite may be present. We propose here that this is the case for the early Paleozoic orogeny in South China. In our model, the West Cathaysia terrane of South China was part of a continent (possibly Australia) on the lower plate and collided with another continent (possibly India) in Cambrian-Ordovician, at the late stage of Gondwana assembly, and the late Ordovician-Silurian Wuyi-Yunkai orogeny, characterized by amphibolite-granulite facies metamorphism and extensive anataxis, was a continuation of the Cambrian-Ordovician collisional orogeny. In this interpretation, the Wuyi-Yunkai orogen was part of the Kuunga orogen before Gondwana breakup.

Supplemental Material: Identifying and characterizing missing source orogens for syn-orogenic basins based on detrital accessory mineral U-Pb geochronology and trace element geochemistry

“…These features suggest a turbidite origin in a proximal slope-basin environment. These sediments were sourced from eastern Gondwana, but the source area(s) and the tectonic pro-cesses responsible for the sediment accumulation are contentious (Yao and Li, 2016;Wang et al, 2023;Xue et al, 2023;Lin et al, 2023).…”