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

• 来源期刊: 国家科学评论（英文版）
• 关键词: rifting marginal basin passive margin South China Sea Western Pacific subduction
• 年，卷（期）: 2019,（5）
• 页码范围: 902-913
• 页数: 12页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwz135

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 Adantic.The recent ocean drilling in the northern South China Sea margin found,however,that the Iberian model of non-volcanic rifted margin from the Adantic 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 Adantic.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.