Intracontinental deformation of the Tianshan Orogen in response to India-Asia collision.

How the continental lithosphere deforms far away from plate boundaries has been long debated. The Tianshan is a type-example of ongoing lithospheric deformation in an intracontinental setting. It formed during the Paleozoic accretion of the Altaids and was rejuvenated in the Cenozoic, which might be a far-field response to the India-Asia collision.

Rollback, scissor-like closure of the Mongol-Okhotsk Ocean and formation of an orocline: magmatic migration based on a large archive of age data.

Tracing the closure of oceans with irregular margins and the formation of an orocline are crucial for understanding plate reconstruction and continental assembly. The eastern Central Asian Orogenic Belt, where the Mongol-Okhotsk orocline is situated, is one of the world's largest magmatic provinces. Using a large data set of U-Pb zircon ages, we updated the timing of many published igneous rocks, which allowed us to recognize tightly 'folded' linear Carboniferous-Jurassic magmatic belts that wrap around the Mongol-Okhotsk suture and their migrations both sutureward and suture-parallel.

Paleoproterozoic high-pressure metamorphism in the northern North China Craton and implications for the Nuna supercontinent.

The connection between the North China Craton (NCC) and contiguous cratons is important for the configuration of the Nuna supercontinent. Here we document a new Paleoproterozoic high-pressure (HP) complex dominated by garnet websterite on the northern margin of the NCC. The peak metamorphism of the garnet websterite was after ∼1.

Synchronous turnover of flora, fauna, and climate at the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary in Asia.

The Eocene-Oligocene Boundary (~34 million years ago) marks one of the largest extinctions of marine invertebrates in the world oceans and of mammalian fauna in Europe and Asia in the Cenozoic era. A shift to a cooler climate across this boundary has been suggested as the cause of this extinction in the marine environment, but there is no manifold evidence for a synchronous turnover of flora, fauna and climate at the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary in a single terrestrial site in Asia to support this hypothesis. Here we report new data of magnetostratigraphy, pollen and climatic proxies in the Asian interior across the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary; our results show that climate change forced a turnover of flora and fauna, suggesting there was a change from large-size perissodactyl-dominant fauna in forests under a warm-temperate climate to small rodent/lagomorph-dominant fauna in forest-steppe in a dry-temperate climate across the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary.