The structure of the south?central Taiwan thrust belt

Resumen

The Taiwan thrust belt is generally thought to develop above a shallow, through-going basal detachment confined to within the sedimentary cover of the Eurasian continental margin. A number of data sets, however, such as surface geology, earthquake hypocentre, and seismic tomography data among others, suggest that crustal levels below the interpreted location of the detachment are also currently being involved in the deformation. In this thesis, new surface geology data were combined with several available geophysical data sets to find a model for the structure of the south-central part of the thrust belt that takes into account deformation taking place at depth. Results of this thesis indicate that beneath the internal Hsuehshan and Central ranges the structural development of the south-central Taiwan thrust belt is controlled by steeply dipping and deep-penetrating faults that are currently inverting pre-existing basement faults inherited from the Eurasian continental margin. Basement rocks are uplifted along these faults to form a basement culmination in the interior of the thrust belt. Beneath the more external Coastal Plain and Western Foothills, however, most of the deformation appears to be taking place near the basement-cover interface, which is acting as an extensive level of detachment and still preserves the extensional geometry inherited from the Eurasian margin.