Relationship Between E-W Extension and N-S Shortening in the Himalayas and Tibet

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9706216 Hodges The Indian-Asian collision zone is the type locality of a continent-continent collision, and studies of this zone reveal the tectonic processes of such collisions that are not obtainable in more ancient collision systems. One particularly confounding feature of results of recent work is that the northern portion of the Tibetan Himalayan range seems to display mostly E-W extension and graben filling, while the southern part of this orogen seems to reflect N-S shortening and recent exhumation. The structural and tectonic processes that allow this relationship to exist are not well known, and are the subject of this project. They will investigate the geology of this region using tectonic geomorphology, for active fault analysis, and sedimentology, stratigraphy, paleomagnetism for the analysis of sediments filling grabens. If they are successful, they will be able to test whether displacement on the south Tibet detachment system alone can explain this south to north transition from compression and extension, as well as constrain the timing of the uplift of the topography. This in turn will allow further testing of the relationship of this topography to climate evolution in the late Cenozoic.