First report of Lower Permian basalts in South Tibet: tholeiitic magmatism during break-up and incipient opening of Neotethys

The Neo-Tethys Ocean began to form at Early Permian times, when continental flood basalts were emplaced in various areas of the newly-formed Indian passive margin, exposed today in the so-called Tibetan Sedimentary Zone of the Himalaya. Lower Permian mafic volcanic rocks, which have long been known from various Himalayan localities from Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, are here for the first time reported to occur also in South Tibet (Bhote Kosi Basalts of the Gyirong County). The basalts unconformably overlie lowermost Permian diamictites, with locally intervening black shales and debris flow deposits, and are followed in turn by chert-bearing quartzarenites and silty to phosphatic marls yielding brachiopods of Roadian-Wordian age. The age of the lavas can thus be bracketed as late Early Permian (post-Sakmarian and pre-Roadian). The geochemistry of these subalkalic tholeiites, akin to MORBs, testifies to their similarity not only with the adjacent Nar-Tsum Spilites of central Nepal, but also with the Panjal Traps and Abor Volcanics of the western and eastern Himalayas respectively. The geochemical signature of Lower Permian volcanic rocks is in fact uniform all along the Himalayan Range, and markedly different from that of basaltic-rhyolitic alkalic products sporadically emplaced during the previous rifting stage. Rift volcanism in the Tethys Himalaya began in the Early Carboniferous and came to an end in Sakmarian times. In the Early Permian, initial submergence of the rift shoulders and sediment starvation were followed by tholeiitic magmatism, which is therefore interpreted as following break-up and incipient sea-floor spreading in the Neotethys Ocean. Roughly contemporaneous emplacement of continental flood basalts of similar geochemical signature along a 2000 km long rift axis would in fact suggest extensive mantle melting at the transition from continental rifting to break-up and opening of the Neotethys between Northern Gondwana and the Peri-Gondwanian blocks. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.