Decelles, P.

Dupont-Nivet, Guillaume

Kapp, Paul

Lippert, Peter,

Torsvik, Trond H.

van Hinsbergen, Douwe J.J.

Lippert, Peter, C.

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Reply to Ali & Aitchison’s comment on ’Restoration ofCenozoic deformation in Asia, and the size of GreaterIndia’Douwe J.J. Van Hinsbergen, Peter Lippert, Guillaume Dupont-Nivet, PaulKapp, P. Decelles, Trond H. TorsvikTo cite this version:Douwe J.J. Van Hinsbergen, Peter Lippert, Guillaume Dupont-Nivet, Paul Kapp, P. Decelles,et al.. Reply to Ali & Aitchison’s comment on ’Restoration of Cenozoic deformation in Asia,and the size of Greater India’. Tectonics, American Geophysical Union (AGU), 2012, 31,pp.TC4007. <10.1029/2012TC003144>. <insu-00771295>HAL Id: insu-00771295https://hal-insu.archives-ouvertes.fr/insu-00771295Submitted on 16 Jul 2013HAL is a multi-disciplinary open accessarchive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come fromteaching and research institutions in France orabroad, or from public or private research centers.L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, estdestine´e au de´poˆt et a` la diffusion de documentsscientifiques de niveau recherche, publie´s ou non,e´manant des e´tablissements d’enseignement et derecherche franc¸ais ou e´trangers, des laboratoirespublics ou prive´s.Reply to comment by Ali and Aitchison on “Restorationof Cenozoic deformation in Asia, and the sizeof Greater India”Douwe J. J. van Hinsbergen,1 Peter C. Lippert,2 Guillaume Dupont-Nivet,3,4,5 Paul Kapp,2Peter G. DeCelles,2 and Trond H. Torsvik1,6,7Received 29 April 2012; revised 31 May 2012; accepted 1 June 2012; published 14 July 2012.Citation: van Hinsbergen, D. J. J., P. C. Lippert, G. Dupont-Nivet, P. Kapp, P. G. DeCelles, and T. H. Torsvik (2012), Reply tocomment by Ali and Aitchison on “Restoration of Cenozoic deformation in Asia, and the size of Greater India”, Tectonics, 31,TC4007, doi:10.1029/2012TC003144.[1] In our recent paper [van Hinsbergen et al., 2011a], weprovide a kinematic restoration of Cenozoic deformation inAsia based on the currently available kinematic estimates onfault zones and fold-thrust belts in Tibet, the Pamir, the TienShan, Mongolia, Siberia and Indochina. Our reconstructionsuggests that approximately 1050 km (in the Pamir) to600 km (in eastern Tibet) of India-Asia convergence wasaccommodated by intraAsian shortening in the last !50 Ma.By comparing this reconstruction with the respective posi-tions of India and Asia constrained by the Eurasia-NorthAmerica-Africa-India plate circuit (using model A of vanHinsbergen et al. [2011b]), we explored the implicationsfor the size for Greater India as a function of collision age,whereby we define Greater India as ‘the area of lithosphereconsumed by northward subduction beneath the Asianmargin since collision of the Tibetan Himalaya with Asia’.Importantly, we do not a priori define that all that lithospheremust be continental in nature. Our reconstruction demon-strated that if collision started by 50 Ma, Greater India at thetime of initial collision must have been up to 2600 km wide.Such a 50 Ma collision age follows from the timing of thefirst arrival of Asia-derived detritus in the Tibetan Himalaya[Najman et al., 2010;Wang et al., 2011; Hu et al., 2012] andthe overlap of paleomagnetically determined paleolatitudesfrom the former southern margin of Asia (the Lhasa terrane)[e.g., Dupont-Nivet et al., 2010a; Lippert et al., 2011], withthose from the Tibetan Himalaya [Patzelt et al., 1996; Yiet al., 2011]. Such a large N-S width of Greater India inLate Cretaceous and Paleocene time is consistent with thehigh-quality paleomagnetic data from Tibetan Himalayanrocks of Patzelt et al. [1996], shown to have undergonenegligible inclination shallowing due to compaction byDupont-Nivet et al. [2010b], and recently corroborated by Yiet al. [2011]: When compared to high-quality paleomagneticpoles from India, those paleomagnetic data demonstrate aN-S separation between the Tibetan Himalaya and theIndian craton of 22.0 " 3.0# (2442 " 333 km) at !68 Ma[van Hinsbergen et al., 2012].[2] In their comment, Ali and Aitchison [2012] questionthe large size of Greater India at the time of collision becauseof strong evidence for a small (<1000 km) Greater India inEarly Cretaceous and older time. We note that they do notquestion any of the data or interpretations constraining theamount of intraAsian shortening, which is central to vanHinsbergen et al. [2011a]. Rather, they question the 50 Macollision age, and prefer a collision age of 34 Ma instead, inpart based on selected paleomagnetic poles from India andAsia (instead of a plate circuit and disregarding paleomag-netic data from the Lhasa terrane and the Tibetan Himalaya),assuming negligible to no intraAsian deformation sincecollision, and a limited (<1000 km) size of Greater Indiabefore collision [Aitchison et al., 2007].[3] We wholeheartedly agree that the N-S size of GreaterIndia in Early Cretaceous time was modest, as put forwardby Ali and Aitchison [2005; 2012]. In addition to the evi-dence they summarize, paleomagnetic data from !120 Marocks in the Tibetan Himalaya of Klootwijk and Bingham[1980] demonstrate that Greater India at that time was notlarger than !900 km (see analysis in van Hinsbergen et al.[2012]). As such, we acknowledge that the size of GreaterIndia at 140 Ma as shown in Figure 1a of van Hinsbergenet al. [2011b] is incorrect. The paleomagnetic data put for-ward from the Upper Cretaceous and Paleocene of theTibetan Himalaya by Patzelt et al. [1996] and Yi et al.[2011] in combination with the pole from the Lower Creta-ceous of Klootwijk and Bingham [1980] thus demonstratethat the size of Greater India increased significantly1Physics of Geological Processes, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.2Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona,USA.3Géosciences Rennes, UMR-CNRS 6118, Université de Rennes 1,Rennes Cedex, France.4Paleomagnetic Laboratory ‘Fort Hoofddijk’, Department of EarthSciences, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands.5Key Laboratory of Orogenic Belts and Crustal Evolution, Ministry ofEducation (Peking University), Beijing, China.6Center for Geodynamics, Geological Survey of Norway (NGU),Trondheim, Norway.7School of Geosciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,South Africa.Corresponding author: D. J. J. van Hinsbergen, Physics of GeologicalProcesses, University of Oslo, Sem Sælands vei 24, NO-0316 Oslo,Norway. (d.v.hinsbergen@fys.uio.no)©2012. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.0278-7407/12/2012TC003144TECTONICS, VOL. 31, TC4007, doi:10.1029/2012TC003144, 2012TC4007 1 of 2(24.1 " 6.3#, or 2675 " 699 km in a N-S direction, see vanHinsbergen et al. [2012]) between!120 and 70 Ma. In otherwords, Greater India underwent major N-S extension inCretaceous time. Van Hinsbergen et al. [2012] argued thatthis extension led to the rifting of a microcontinent thatcontained the Tibetan Himalaya away from the Indian cra-ton, opening a largely oceanic ‘Greater India Basin’ betweenthe Tibetan Himalaya and the Indian craton. Such significantrifting is consistent with well-documented alkali-basalticvolcanic and volcaniclastic sediments from the Lower Cre-taceous (140–100Ma) of the Tibetan Himalaya [Gaetani andGarzanti, 1991; Garzanti, 1999; Jadoul et al., 1998; Zhuet al., 2008; Hu et al., 2010]. The large size of GreaterIndia as shown in Figures 1b–1d of van Hinsbergen et al.[2011b] and Figures 4 and 5 of van Hinsbergen et al.[2011a] is thus supported by paleomagnetic data.[4] For reasons unknown, Ali and Aitchison [2006; 2012]and Aitchison et al. [2007; 2011] ignore the high-qualitypaleomagnetic evidence presented by Patzelt et al. [1996](and Yi et al. [2011]) for a large Greater India since!70 Ma. They also ignore paleomagnetic data from theLhasa terrane, as presented by e.g., Chen et al. [2010],Dupont-Nivet et al. [2010a], and Liebke et al. [2010]. As aconsequence, their paleomagnetic argument that the colli-sion between the Tibetan Himalaya and the Lhasa terranemust be as young as 34 Ma is flawed.[5] In summary, the arguments put forward by Ali andAitchison [2012] for a modest size of Greater India at andbefore 130 Ma are in our view correct. Their conclusion thatthis evidence disproves the large size of Greater India byLate Cretaceous time, however, neglects robust paleomag-netic data showing that the size of Greater India increasedsignificantly after the Early Cretaceous and before collisionof the Tibetan Himalaya with Asia [van Hinsbergen et al.,2012], and is hence incorrect.ReferencesAitchison, J. C., J. R. Ali, and A. M. Davis (2007), When and where didIndia and Asia collide?, J. Geophys. Res., 112, B05423, doi:10.1029/2006JB004706.Aitchison, J., X. Xia, A. T. Baxter, and J. R. Ali (2011), Detrital zirconU–Pb ages along the Yarlung-Tsangpo suture zone, Tibet: Implicationsfor oblique convergence and collision between India and Asia, Gond-wana Res., 20, 691–709, doi:10.1016/j.gr.2011.04.002.Ali, J. R., and J. C. Aitchison (2005), Greater India, Earth Sci. Rev., 72,169–188, doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2005.07.005.Ali, J. R., and J. C. Aitchison (2006), Positioning Paleogene Eurasia prob-lem: Solution for 60–50 Ma and broader tectonic implications, EarthPlanet. Sci. Lett., 251, 148–155, doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2006.09.003.Ali, J. R., and J. Aitchison (2012), Comment on “Restoration of Cenozoicdeformation in Asia and the size of Greater India” by D. J. J. vanHinsbergen et al., Tectonics, 30, TC5003, doi:10.1029/2011TC002908.Chen, J., B. Huang, and L. Sun (2010), New constraints to the onset of theIndia–Asia collision: Paleomagnetic reconnaissance on the LinzizongGroup in the Lhasa Block, China, Tectonophysics, 489, 189–209,doi:10.1016/j.tecto.2010.04.024.Dupont-Nivet, G., P. Lippert, D. J. J. van Hinsbergen, M. J. M. Meijers, andP. Kapp (2010a), Paleolatitude and age of the Indo-Asia collision: Paleo-magnetic constraints, Geophys. J. Int., 182, 1189–1198, doi:10.1111/j.1365-246X.2010.04697.x.Dupont-Nivet, G., D. J. J. van Hinsbergen, and T. H. Torsvik (2010b),Persistently shallow paleomagnetic inclinations in Asia: Tectonic impli-cations for the Indo-Asia collision, Tectonics, 29, TC5016,doi:10.1029/2008TC002437.Gaetani, M., and E. Garzanti (1991), Multicyclic history of the northernIndia continental margin (northwestern Himalaya), AAPG Bull., 75,1427–1446.Garzanti, E. (1999), Stratigraphy and sedimentary history of the NepalTethys Himalaya passive margin, J. 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