The early Paleozoic alkali dyke swarms in the Ziyang-Langao areas of south Qinling are characterized by bimodal volcanic association. They show the patterns of enriched LREE with high fractionation of light and heavy REE and enrichment of incompatible elements in the primitive man-tle-normalized spider-diagrams with peaks of Ba and Nb and valleys of Pb and Sr. The ratios of Ta/Hf are larger than 0.3 and those of Th/Ta less than 1.6, indicating that they were derived from enriched mantle sources closely related to plume. The occurrence of alkali dyke swarm demon-strates an extensional event of crust resulting from deep plume activity in the Qinling orogeny dur-ing early Paleozoic. The rifting extension could not continue due to the short activity of plume. Consequently, no new oceanic basin was formed.
The Mianltüe suture extends from Demi-Nanping-Pipasi-Kangxian to the Lüeyang-Mianxian area, then traverses the Bashan arcuate structure eastward to the Huashan region, and finally to the Qingshuihe area of the southern Dabie Mountains. From east to west, with a length of over 1500 km, the ophiolitic melangé associations are distributed discontinuously along the suture. The rock assemblages include ophiolite, island-arc and oceanic island rock series,indicating that there existed a suture zone and a vanished paleo-ocean basin. The Mianlüe paleo-ocean basin experienced its main expansion and formation process during the Carboniferous-Permian and closed totally in the Triassic. It belongs to the northern branch of the eastern paleotethys, separated from the northern margin of the Yangtze block under the paleotethys mantle dynamic system.
Nd-Pb isotopic geochemistry of metabasalt from Dur抧goi ophiolite, Qinghai Prov-ince, NW China reveals the presence of DMM mixing with EMII components in its upper mantle source, which is comparable with present Indian MORB. Comparisons indicate that the geo-chemistry, chronology and source characteristics of Dur抧goi ophiolite coincide with Pa-leo-tethyan ophiolites from 揝anjiang?area. Together with evidences from regional geology in adjacent areas, this study proves that independent paleo-tethyan basins evolved contemporarily, the dynamics of which is attributed to the interaction of mantle plume with over-riding lithosphere.
CHEN Liang1,2, SUN Yong1,2, PEI Xianzhi2, Feng Tao2 & Zhang Guowei2 1. Open Laboratory of Continental Dynamics, Ministry of Education, Northwest University, Xi抋n 710069, China
