The South China Sea is not a mini-Atlantic: plate-edge rifting vs intra-plate rifting  

作　　者：Pinxian Wang Chi-Yue Huang Jian Lin Zhimin Jian Zhen Sun Minghui Zhao 

机构地区：[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

出　　处：《National Science Review》2019年第5期902-913,共12页国家科学评论（英文版）

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China as a part of the ‘South China Sea Deep’ Project(91128000)

摘　　要：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.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.

关 键 词：RIFTING MARGINAL basin passive margin South China Sea Western PACIFIC SUBDUCTION 

分 类 号：P736[天文地球—海洋地质] P722.7[天文地球—海洋科学]