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Plateau uplift in western Canada caused by lithospheric delamination along a craton edge

Nature Geoscience volume 7, pages 830–833 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Continental plateaux, such as the Tibetan Plateau in Asia and the Altiplano–Puna Plateau in South America, are thought to form partly because upwelling, hot asthenospheric mantle replaces some of the denser, lower lithosphere1,2,3,4, making the region more buoyant. The spatial and temporal scales of this process are debated, with proposed mechanisms ranging from delamination of fragments to that of the entire lithosphere1,2,3,4. The Canadian Cordillera is an exhumed ancient plateau that abuts the North American Craton5. The region experienced rapid uplift during the mid-to-late Eocene, followed by voluminous magmatism6, a transition from a compressional to extensional tectonic regime7 and removal of mafic lower crust8. Here we use Rayleigh-wave tomographic and thermochronological data to show that these features can be explained by delamination of the entire lithosphere beneath the Canadian Cordillera. We show that the transition from the North American Craton to the plateau is marked by an abrupt reduction in lithospheric thickness by more than 150 km and that asthenosphere directly underlies the crust beneath the plateau region. We identify a 250-km-wide seismic anomaly about 150–250 km beneath the plateau that we interpret as a block of intact, delaminated lithosphere. We suggest that mantle material upwelling along the sharp craton edge9 triggered large-scale delamination of the lithosphere about 55 million years ago, and caused the plateau to uplift.

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Figure 1: Shear velocity (Vs), topography and aeromagnetic maps of the study region.
Figure 2: Heat flow, Curie depth, topography and Vs profile for the southern Canadian Cordillera.
Figure 3: Model for evolution of the Cordilleran back-arc orogenic plateau.

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Acknowledgements

Seismic data were downloaded from the Incorporated Research Institution for Seismology Data Management Center and Canadian National Data Center. This study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geoscience, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada,

    Xuewei Bao, David W. Eaton & Bernard Guest

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  1. Xuewei Bao
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  2. David W. Eaton
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  3. Bernard Guest
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Contributions

X.B. performed Rayleigh-wave tomography. Thermal calculations and model conceptualization were provided by D.W.E. Thermochronologic data and concepts were provided by B.G. All authors contributed to discussion of the results and their implications, as well as preparation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xuewei Bao.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Bao, X., Eaton, D. & Guest, B. Plateau uplift in western Canada caused by lithospheric delamination along a craton edge. Nature Geosci 7, 830–833 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2270

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