Lesnaya Nappe, Northern Kamchatka.pdf

469 Geotectonics, Vol. 36, No. 6, 2002, pp. 469–482. Translated from Geotektonika, No. 6, 2002, pp. 45–59. Original Russian Text Copyright ? 2002 by Solov’ev, Shapiro, Garver. English Translation Copyright ? 2002 by MAIK “Nauka /Interperiodica” (Russia). INTRODUCTION Northeast Asia is a collage of noncoeval heteroge- neous terranes docked up to Eurasia during the Meso- zoic and Cenozoic [1, 2, 4, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, 47, 51]. The last, accreted to Northeast Asia, is a belt of intensely deformed volcaniclastics that extends into Kamchatka from the front of the Olyutorsky zone (Fig. 1). This belt is composed of Cretaceous marginal marine and island-arc rock associations [1, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28] that presently rest upon a heterogeneous base- ment [3, 16]. Paleomagnetic data suggest that the island-arc sequences were deposited 20 ° south of the part of the continent [11, 13] to which they are currently welded. It is obvious that the arc had drifted over a con- siderable distance within an oceanic plate(s) before it collided with the continent [12, 22, 23, 34] and both were deformed, giving rise to an extensive collisional suture [14, 21, 23, 30, 32]. At the same time, there is no final answer to the question of where and how the col- lision actually took place. The answer depends largely upon the precise dating of the collision. It is believed that the collision between a Cretaceous island arc and the Asian continent induced changes in North Pacific plate kinematics the extinction of the Kula-Pacific Ridge, and led to a veer of the Pacific plate drift direc- tion [38]. Thus, the precise dating of the collision between the Late Cretaceous arc and Eurasia is impor- tant for the understanding of the tectonic processes that took place along the northern periphery of the Pacific Ocean during the first half of the Cenozoic. LESNAYA–VATYN THRUST FAULT The Lesnaya–Vatyn thrust fault (Fig. 1) is among the largest sutures in Northeast Asia; it is traceable in souther