Unraveling the timing and style of the India-Asia collision and temporal evolution of the western Himalayan fold and thrust belt, Pakistan

• Applicant: Professor Edward Sobel, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Geology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522200599

The Himalaya fold and thrust belt formed during the India - Asia collision and serves as an outstanding natural laboratory to study systematic feedbacks between lithospheric and climatic processes. The evolution of sedimentary basins filled with syn-orogenic sediments and their subsequent incorporation into fold-and-thrust belts can be studied by examining sediment source-to-sink networks and the structural style of the adjacent fold-and-thrust belts. In orogenic settings where evidence of collision and associated nascent uplift is often obscured by strong tectonothermal and erosional overprints, provenance studies of clastic material archived in sedimentary basins can provide indispensable information about the tectonic history of the source areas. Such studies offer an in-depth view into the exhumation and transport history of the clastic material and the characteristics of its source areas. Additionally, detrital thermochronometry of foreland basin sediments allows for the reconstruction of the thermal and exhumation histories of the evolving orogenic systems and/or the thermal history of the fold-and-thrust belt. Stratigraphic sections from different parts of the Himalayas have been used to decode the detrital signals of the India-Asia convergence related events. The complete stratigraphic sections in the Sulaiman Range, located at the westernmost end of the Himalayas, can provide new insights into India-Asia convergence related events and Himalayan evolution. In this project, we aim to integrate geological, thermochronological and detrital zircon U/Pb geochronological datasets from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary successions in the Sulaiman Range to address the convergence history of the India-Asia and to provide detailed timing constraints for the structural evolution of the fold and thrust system. Competing India-Asia collisional models can be better tested through provenance analyses of these sediments, particularily with new detrital zircon U-Pb data, which can distinguish among Indian plate, Asian plate and Kohistan-Ladakh arc sources. We will use apatite fission track and apatite and zircon (U-Th-m)/He thermochronology combined with structural data to quantify the deformation of the Sulaiman fold-and-thrust belt sediments and the structural evolution of the western Himalayan fold-and-thrust belt.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Anne Bernhardt; Dr. Humaad Ghani