Evolution of Paleozoic West Junggar Basin, NW China: Seismic data, detrital zircon evidence from Earth’s oldest alkali lake deposit

Abstract

The Permian Fengcheng Formation of the Western Junggar region in the Southwestern Central Asian Orogenic Belt (CAOB) represents one of Earth’s oldest alkali lake deposits. Here, we present a comprehensive study of the stratigraphy, petrography, two-dimensional seismic data, U–Pb geochronology, and Hf isotope analysis of detrital zircons of this deposit. The results, in conjunction with published data, reflect the tectonic evolution of southwestern CAOB. The ages of detrital zircons indicate that the Fengcheng Formation deposition is inferred to have concluded the early Permian Kungurian. The Hf isotopes of detrital zircons indicate that the detritus for the Fengcheng Formation was derived from upper crustal magmatic sources. The West Junggar Basin preserves the records of three Paleozoic tectonic stages. The first stage occurred in the Early Paleozoic and involved intraoceanic subduction and arc-continent collision. The second stage involved the Carboniferous closure of the Junggar Ocean following successive filling of oceanic basins. The final stage occurred in the Early Permian and was related to intracontinental rifting and tectonic inversion. The results of comparing the comprehensive data of U–Pb ages and Hf isotopes of 2537 zircons from West Junggar, Tianshan and Altay show that the orogenic belts to the south of the CAOB experienced similar plate kinematics and vertical crustal growth in the Paleozoic.

Keywords

Detrital zircon dating / Alkali lake deposit / Multiple tectonic events / Crustal growth / Central Asian Orogenic Belt

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Shailesh Kumar Yadav: Conceptualization, Data curation, Visualization, Writing – original draft. AL. Ramanathan: Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Chidambaram Sabarathinam: Writing – review & editing. Alok Kumar: Writing – review & editing. Manoj Kumar: Writing – review & editing. Anshula Dhiman: Investigation, Visualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the CSIR (Government of India) for offering the CSIR-SR Fellowship. Author is also thankful to IUAC for extending the XRD and XRF facility, funded by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) under the Geochronology project [MoES/P.O.(Seismic)8(09)-Geochron/2012]. The authors are thankful to the CIF (Central Instrumentation Facility), School of Environmental Sciences, and AIRF (Advanced Instrumentation Research Facility), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, for providing additional support and instrumentation facility. This research was primarily supported by the CSIR fellowship. XRD and XRF analyses were conducted at the IUAC, under UGC, allowing access to facilities without any charge. Other analyses were performed internally at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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