North Chinacraton

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Present location of the core of the North Chinakraton

The North China Craton - also known as the North China Craton or Sinokorean Craton - is one of the smaller continental cratons on earth . It covers an area of ​​about 1.7 million square kilometers in northeast China , northern Korea and southern part of Mongolia .

Geological history

The North Chinakraton is made up of several larger blocks that have been severely tilted and folded over time due to collisions with other continental land masses. The main blocks of the North Chinakratons are the Eastern Block and the Western Block, which were connected or welded by a central orogenic belt . The Central Orogenic Belt stretches from western Liaoning via Beijing to western Henan and contains mainly igneous rocks from the Paleoproterozoic . To the west of this zone, the western block extends across Shanxi , Shaanxi , Inner Mongolia, and northern Gansu . This block is the oldest and most stable part of the craton and contains some of the oldest and mineralogically most interesting rocks in Asia , especially in the areas of Inner Mongolia with its large deposits ( Bayan Obo Mine , Bürentsogt etc.) of economically interesting ores.

The eastern block is, unusually for a craton, severely affected by crust thinning, which began in the Mesozoic and reduced the crust thickness from originally 200 km to 80 km. In the Changbai Mountains and Shandong there was extensive volcanism in the Tertiary .

Before the Triassic , the North Chinacraton was an independent continent enclosed by the ocean. For most of the Paleozoic it was near the North Pole ; until the collision with the Siberia continent, it formed the northernmost major land mass on earth at that time.

swell

  • Qing-Ren Meng, Guo-Wei Zhang, (1999): Timing of collision of the North and South China blocks: Controversy and reconciliation . - Geology , volume 27, number 2, pp. 123-126.
  • Zhao Guochun, Sun Min & Simon A. Wilde, (2003): Major tectonic units of the North China Craton and their Paleoproterozoic assembly . - Science in China , volume 46, number 1, pp. 23-38.
  • Yan-Jie Tang, Hong-Fu Zhang, M. Santosh & Ji-Feng Ying, (2013): Differential destruction of the North China Crato: A tectonic perspective . - Journal of Asian Earth Sciences , volume 78, pp. 71-82.