Professor WANG Erqi and his cooperators publish a writing entitled Two-Phase Growth of High Topography in Eastern Tibet during the Cenozoic. The research implies that significant topographic relief existed adjacent to the Sichuan Basin before the Indo-Asian collision. Furthermore, the onset of Cenozoic mountain building probably pre-dated development of the weak lower crust, implying that early topography was instead formed during thickening of the upper crust along faults.

The achievement receives high marks by Professor Michael E. Oskin, who works in the department of Geology, University of California Davis. Professor Michael writes a review article about WANG’s, in which Michael introduces WANG’s viewpoint that topography did exist on the Tibetan plateau margin before the Miocene, and thus the view that the plateau surface formed first as a low-elevation peneplain and was then uplifted needs to be revisited; and that uplift and exhumation of the Longmen Shan occurred during two distinct and rapid pulses, beginning in the Oligocene and the Late Miocene. The findings add to an emerging picture of early, broadly distributed overthrusting across east Asia in areas presently within or adjacent to the eastern Tibetan Plateau, and implies that two distinct mechanisms for topographic growth — faulting and lower crustal flow — together contributed to eastern Tibet’s high topography.

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