Kunlun Volcanic Group
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Kunlun Volcanic Group
Kunlun Volcanic Group (), also known as Ashikule Volcanic Field, is a volcanic field in northwestern Tibet. Eight other volcanic fields are also in the area. The field is within a basin that also contains three lakes. Volcanism in the field has produced lavas and cones, with rocks having varying compositions dominated by trachyandesite. Volcanism in the field may be influenced by faults in the area. The dates obtained from the field range from 5.0 ± 0.6 million years ago to 74,000 ± 4,000 years ago. An eruption of Ashi volcano was observed in 1951, making this one of China's youngest volcanoes. Geological context The Tibetan Plateau formed through the collision of India with Eurasia. Potassium-rich volcanic activity in the Tibetan Plateau has been occurring since 50 million years ago. After 8 million years ago, this volcanism occurred mainly in northwestern Tibet. It is not clear why volcanism occurs in the Tibetan plateau considering that the area is dominated by the collis ...
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China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or dyna ...
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Tengchong
Tengchong () is a county-level city of Baoshan City, western Yunnan province, People's Republic of China. It is well known for its volcanic activity. The city is named after the town of Tengchong which serves as its political center, previously known as Tengyue () in Chinese. English language sources of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries use names such as Teng-Chung, Tingyueh, Teng Yueh, Momein and Momien. It borders with Myanmar in the northwest for . By road, it is west of the provincial capital, Kunming, and westward from Baoshan's urban area. Tengchong marks the southwestern terminus of the Heihe–Tengchong Line, an imaginary line significant in geography that divides the area of China into two roughly equal parts. History Early history Tengchong is one of the earliest developed regions in Southwest China. During the Western Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 24), it belonged to Yizhou Commandery. In the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties, a contemporar ...
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Lava
Lava is molten or partially molten rock (magma) that has been expelled from the interior of a terrestrial planet (such as Earth) or a moon onto its surface. Lava may be erupted at a volcano or through a fracture in the crust, on land or underwater, usually at temperatures from . The volcanic rock resulting from subsequent cooling is also often called ''lava''. A lava flow is an outpouring of lava during an effusive eruption. (An explosive eruption, by contrast, produces a mixture of volcanic ash and other fragments called tephra, not lava flows.) The viscosity of most lava is about that of ketchup, roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times that of water. Even so, lava can flow great distances before cooling causes it to solidify, because lava exposed to air quickly develops a solid crust that insulates the remaining liquid lava, helping to keep it hot and inviscid enough to continue flowing. The word ''lava'' comes from Italian and is probably derived from the Latin word ''labes ...
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Altyn Tagh Fault
The Altyn Tagh Fault (ATF) is a 2,000 km long, active, sinistral (left lateral) strike-slip fault that forms the northwestern boundary of the Tibetan Plateau with the Tarim Basin. It is one of the major sinistral strike-slip structures that together help to accommodate the eastward motion of this zone of thickened crust, relative to the Eurasian Plate. A total displacement of about ~475 km has been estimated for this fault zone since the middle Oligocene, although the amount of displacement, age of initiation and slip rate are disputed. Tectonic setting The Tibetan Plateau is an area of thickened continental crust, a result of the ongoing collision of the Indo-Australian Plate with the Eurasian Plate. The way in which this zone accommodates the collision remains unclear with two end-member models being proposed. The first regards the crust as being made up of a mosaic of strong blocks separated by weak fault zones, the 'microplate' model. The second regards the deformatio ...
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Strike Slip Fault
In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic forces, with the largest forming the boundaries between the plates, such as the megathrust faults of subduction zones or transform faults. Energy release associated with rapid movement on active faults is the cause of most earthquakes. Faults may also displace slowly, by aseismic creep. A ''fault plane'' is the plane that represents the fracture surface of a fault. A ''fault trace'' or ''fault line'' is a place where the fault can be seen or mapped on the surface. A fault trace is also the line commonly plotted on geologic maps to represent a fault. A ''fault zone'' is a cluster of parallel faults. However, the term is also used for the zone of crushed rock along a single fault. Prolonged motion along closely spaced faults can blur the ...
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Pull Apart Basin
In geology, a basin is a region where subsidence generates accommodation space for the deposition of sediments. A pull-apart basin is a structural basin where two overlapping (en echelon) strike-slip faults or a fault bend creates an area of crustal extension undergoing tension, which causes the basin to sink down. Frequently, the basins are rhombic or sigmoidal in shape. Dimensionally, basins are limited to the distance between the faults and the length of overlap.Frisch, Wolfgang, Martin Meschede, and Ronald C. Blakey. ''Plate tectonics: Continental drift and mountain building''. Springer, 2010. Pull-apart basins are also referred to as overlapping-tension-zones (OTZ). Mechanics and fault configuration The inhomogeneity and structural complexity of continental crust causes faults to deviate from a straight course and frequently causes bends or step-overs in fault paths. Bends and step-overs of adjacent faults become favorable locations for extensional and compressional ...
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Yutian County, Xinjiang
Yutian County ( zh, s= ), also transliterated from Uyghur as Keriya County ( ug, كېرىيە ناھىيىسى; zh, s= ), is a county in Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. It is based at the Keriya Town, and is separate from Hotan County, which is another county in the same prefecture. The Yutian County has an area of . According to the 2002 census, it has a population of 220,000. The county is bounded on the north by Aksu Prefecture, on the east by Minfeng/Niya County, on the west by Qira County and on the south by the Rutog and Gertse counties of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Name The county derives its Chinese name from the Kingdom of Khotan. The name was written as '' at that time. This was later changed to '' (literally, Jade Field) following the adoption of Simplified Chinese and eventually to '' in 1959. The three names have a similar pronunciation in Mandarin Chinese. The original name of Hotan/Khotan is Gosthana/Gausthana/Gaustana, Gu-dana, G ...
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Kunlun Shan
The Kunlun Mountains ( zh, s=昆仑山, t=崑崙山, p=Kūnlún Shān, ; ug, كۇئېنلۇن تاغ تىزمىسى / قۇرۇم تاغ تىزمىسى ) constitute one of the longest mountain chains in Asia, extending for more than . In the broadest sense, the chain forms the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau south of the Tarim Basin. The exact definition of Kunlun Mountains varies over time. Older sources used Kunlun to mean the mountain belt that runs across the center of China, that is, Altyn Tagh along with the Qilian and Qin Mountains. Recent sources have the Kunlun range forming most of the south side of the Tarim Basin and then continuing east, south of the Altyn Tagh. Sima Qian (''Records of the Grand Historian'', scroll 123) says that Emperor Wu of Han sent men to find the source of the Yellow River and gave the name Kunlun to the mountains at its source. The name seems to have originated as a semi-mythical location in the classical Chinese text ''Classic of Moun ...
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Fault Block
Fault blocks are very large blocks of rock, sometimes hundreds of kilometres in extent, created by tectonic and localized stresses in Earth's crust. Large areas of bedrock are broken up into blocks by faults. Blocks are characterized by relatively uniform lithology. The largest of these fault blocks are called crustal blocks. Large crustal blocks broken off from tectonic plates are called terranes. Those terranes which are the full thickness of the lithosphere are called microplates. Continent-sized blocks are called variously ''microcontinents, continental ribbons, H-blocks, extensional allochthons and outer highs.'' Because most stresses relate to the tectonic activity of moving plates, most motion between blocks is horizontal, that is parallel to the Earth's crust by strike-slip faults. However vertical movement of blocks produces much more dramatic results. Landforms (mountains, hills, ridges, lakes, valleys, etc.) are sometimes formed when the faults have a large v ...
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Tarim Basin
The Tarim Basin is an endorheic basin in Northwest China occupying an area of about and one of the largest basins in Northwest China.Chen, Yaning, et al. "Regional climate change and its effects on river runoff in the Tarim Basin, China." Hydrological Processes 20.10 (2006): 2207–2216.online 426 KB) Located in China's Xinjiang region, it is sometimes used synonymously to refer to the southern half of the province, or Southern Xinjiang, Nanjiang (), as opposed to the northern half of the province known as Dzungaria or Beijiang. Its northern boundary is the Tian Shan mountain range and its southern boundary is the Kunlun Mountains on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The Taklamakan Desert dominates much of the basin. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr (Uyghur language, Traditional spelling: 六城 or ), which means 'six cities' in Uyghur language, Uyghur. Geography and relation to Xinjiang Xinjiang consists of two main geographically, historically, and ...
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Seismic Velocity
A seismic wave is a wave of acoustic energy that travels through the Earth. It can result from an earthquake, volcanic eruption, magma movement, a large landslide, and a large man-made explosion that produces low-frequency acoustic energy. Seismic waves are studied by seismologists, who record the waves using seismometers, hydrophones (in water), or accelerometers. Seismic waves are distinguished from seismic noise (ambient vibration), which is persistent low-amplitude vibration arising from a variety of natural and anthropogenic sources. The propagation velocity of a seismic wave depends on density and elasticity of the medium as well as the type of wave. Velocity tends to increase with depth through Earth's crust and mantle, but drops sharply going from the mantle to Earth's outer core. Earthquakes create distinct types of waves with different velocities. When recorded by a seismic observatory, their different travel times help scientists locate the quake's hypocenter ...
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Tianshuihai
Tianshuihai (), alternately spelled Tien Shui Hai, is a salt water lake in the disputed Aksai Chin region administered by China as part of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region (Hotan County, Hotan Prefecture), which is also claimed by India. The lake's basin is a small plain, formerly known as the Thaldat basin or Mapothang. The lake drains the Thaldat stream that flows from the southwest. It is located east of the Lokzhung Range and northwest of the Aksai Chin Lake. The Xinjiang–Tibet Highway of the 1950s was laid close to the lake, and an army service station was built on its banks, called the Tianshuihai service station. Around 2000, an improved national highway (G219) was laid on a new alignment further to the east, and the Tianshuihai service station was moved to a new location, closer to the new alignment. Toponymy The name Tianshuihai means "sweet water sea" in Chinese, supposedly originating in local army folklore about a dying soldier whose last words before pas ...
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