Tectonic-thermal history and hydrocarbon potential of the Pearl River Mouth Basin, northern South China Sea: Insights from borehole apatite fission-track thermochronology

Abstract

The Pearl River Mouth Basin (PRMB) is one of the most petroliferous basins on the northern margin of the South China Sea. Knowledge of the thermal history of the PRMB is significant for understanding its tectonic evolution and for unraveling its poorly studied source-rock maturation history. Our investigations in this study are based on apatite fission-track (AFT) thermochronology analysis of 12 cutting samples from 4 boreholes. Both AFT ages and length data suggested that the PRMB has experienced quite complicated thermal evolution. Thermal history modeling results unraveled four successive events of heating separated by three stages of cooling since the early Middle Eocene. The cooling events occurred approximately in the Late Eocene, early Oligocene, and the Late Miocene, possibly attributed to the Zhuqiong II Event, Nanhai Event, and Dongsha Event, respectively. The erosion amount during the first cooling stage is roughly estimated to be about 455-712 m, with an erosion rate of 0.08-0.12 mm/a. The second erosion-driven cooling is stronger than the first one, with an erosion amount of about 747-814 m and an erosion rate between about 0.13-0.21 mm/a. The erosion amount calculated related to the third cooling event varies from 800 m to 3419 m, which is speculative due to the possible influence of the magmatic activity.

Keywords

Oil and gas / Hydrocarbon potential / Apatite fission-track / Tectonic-thermal evolution / Thermal history modeling / Cooling event / Heating event / Marine geological survey engineering / Erosion amount and rate / Oil-gas exploration engineering / Pearl River Mouth Basin / The South China Sea

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xiao-yin Tang and Shu-chun Yang conceived of the presented idea. Sheng-biao Hu verified the analytical methods and supervised the findings of this work. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgment

This study is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42072181). We thank Raymond Donelick and Paul O'Sullivan from the A to Z Inc. for the sample analysis.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary data (Figs. S1–S3; Tables. S1–S12) to this article can be found online at doi: 10.31035/cg2022055

Fig. S1. Length distribution of apatite confined fission tracks of samples from the Pearl River Mouth Basin. Lm = measured mean confined track length (±σ) (μm), N = number of tracks.

Fig. S2. Confined track lengths VS Dpar of each sample.

Fig. S3. Results of single-grain apatite fission-track ages (1σ) and Dpar of each sample.

Tables. S1-S12. Summary of Apatite fission-track age and confined track length data for all the 12 samples from the Pearl River Mouth Basin.

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