Mid-crustal detachment beneath western Tibet exhumed where conjugate Karakoram and Longmu–Gozha Co faults intersect

Models for how shortening is accommodated in the India–Asia collision vary between an end member in which largely rigid blocks are extruded eastwards between lithospheric-scale strike-slip faults and an end member in which a hot, weak mid-crustal layer aids distributed deformation. Here the mode of crustal deformation is evaluated by studying the intersection of two main conjugate strike-slip faults at the west end of the Tibetan plateau. Our field mapping suggests that these faults, the right-lateral Karakoram fault and the left-lateral Longmu–Gozha Co fault, an eastward continuation of the Altyn Tagh fault, may be connected by a large-scale, east-dipping listric normal fault, exposing a wedge of mid-crustal rocks in its footwall. Pseudosection modeling of matrix and porphyroclast rim compositions from footwall metamorphic rocks yield late-syntectonic pressures of 640 ± 100   MPa and temperatures around 600 ± 50 °C . Extensive networks of narrow granitic dikes give U–Pb zircon ages as young as 13.7 ± 0.2   Ma , suggesting that footwall rocks remained hot until the late Miocene and were not exhumed until after this time. We infer >40 km heave across the Angmong fault, and suggest that it absorbs effectively all of the slip across the Longmu–Gozha Co fault (which it appears to truncate), so the Longmu–Gozha Co fault is seemingly confined to the upper crust. Similar mechanical decoupling likely occurs throughout the plateau, with strike-slip faulting in western Tibet limited to the upper, brittle part of the crust.