Article How Did South China Connect to and Separate From Gondwana? N...
Superficially the reconstruction looks great. However, a moderate issue concerns the fitting of the blocks off Australia. In the published recon (Fig.3a-c), the Lhasa is placed flush against Australia's present-day shoreline - submarine features such as the Exmouth Plateau and the rest of the shelf, which is rather wide) are not accommodated. However, they cannot be ignored. Additionally, the last phase of rifting in the region (Jurassic, ?Middle to Late) had blocks departing from there so there must have been additional material separating the modern day Australian land-sea boundary from the Cimmerian fragments. This flaw is not restricted to the published study and has in fact been repeated in many recent Gondwana models. The topic is important, but this important issue is either being overlooked or ignored. In future publications this definitely needs to be addressed. Regards, Jason Ali (Hong Kong)
Thanks for your suggestion @ Jason R Ali. Yes, the shoreline is not always the margin of a continent. The region you mentioned off NW Australia should belong to the passive continental margin formed during Gondwanan dispersion. It needs to be considered in Gondwana reconstruction. I have a question that does this submarine continental part need to be included in reconstructing older paleocontinents? In other words, when did this region become part of Australian continent?
Dear Hanbiao Xian. Thanks for getting back to me. The NW Australian shelf needs to be accommodated in all models to at least the start of the Paleozoic. The crust here has not been added to Australia during that time. To help you, I suggest you check out the recons shown in the latter part of: Palaeomagnetic re-investigation of Early Permian rift basalts from the Baoshan Block, SW China: constraints on the site-of-origin of the Gondwana-derived eastern Cimmerian terranes
JR Ali, HMC Cheung, JC Aitchison, YD Sun (2013) Geophysical Journal International 193 (5), 650-663. If you want, I could pass on the Coreldraw stencil. Robert Hall also give a lot of thought to this sub-region so you should consult some of his post 2010 papers.
The topic I presented is very important, and I think it is necessary to communicate with specialists to consult them and listen to their opinions
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