Cretaceous‐Cenozoic Landscape Evolution of Southern East Asia: New Constraints From Sediment Provenances

Mesozoic‐Cenozoic landscape evolution of East Asia reflects the dynamic coeval tectonic interactions between the Asian and surrounding plates, including the westward Pacific subduction, opening of the South China Sea, and consumption of the Neo‐Tethys and subsequent Cenozoic Indo‐Asia collision. A proposal that has been widely referred to is termed as the “seesaw” model, which suggested that the first‐order Neogene‐modern east‐tilting geomorphology of East Asia evolved from a Cretaceous‐Paleogene west‐tilting landscape, characterized by extensive high coastal mountains in the east and relatively low terrains in the west. In this study, we testify this model by constraining drainage reorganization history in southern South China. Our paleodrainage reconstructions, using paleocurrent and zircon U‐Pb analyses, focus on four contiguous sedimentary basins (namely Yulin, Shiwandashan, Nanning, and Baise), extending for ∼500 km in the South China Block. Results show that the main paleodrainages feeding the basins evolved from Cretaceous west‐flowing, via Paleogene bidirectional, to late Oligocene (<33 Ma) modern‐like east‐flowing, suggesting the landscape evolved from Cretaceous west‐tilting, via a Paleogene transitional synform‐like landscape, to late Oligocene‐present east‐tilting. The newly reconstructed Paleogene synform‐like landscape, with highlands in both the southeast Tibetan Plateau and eastern coastal continental margin, is also compatible with the published paleo‐elevation reconstructions in the southeast Tibetan Plateau. We further propose that, apart from the barrier and thermal effects of the Tibetan Plateau, late Oligocene lowering of the coastal mountains allowed the oceanic moist air to reach the continental interior, thus explaining the coeval climatic transition from arid to humid conditions in South China.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Tectonics

• Publication date

  2025-06-01

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1029/2024TC008661
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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