Episodic, Multi-staged Lithospheric Delamination Responsible for Destruction of the North China Craton

Archean cratons represent the oldest tectonic units on the Earth and most of them are tectonically stable for >3 Ga. The North China Craton (NCC), however, had undergone extensive destruction during the Mesozoic to Cenozoic as seen from surface volcanism, magmatism, and tectonic deformation and geochemical and seismic observations suggesting removal and replacement of thick, old, and fertile cratonic lithosphere with thin, young, and depleted oceanic-type lithosphere [Griffin et al., 1998; Xu, 2001; Menzies et al., 2007; Zhu et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2012]. Lithospheric delamination has been proposed to explain different episodes of volcanism in the Jurassic [Gao et al., 2004; 2008] and Cretaceous [Yang et al., 2003; Wu et al., 2003] on NCC and hence as a mechanism for destruction of NCC. However, the relatively long period (~100 Myr) of volcanism associated with the destruction of NCC was considered as a challenge to the delamination process [Menzies et al., 2007] which typically lasts for several Myr [Conrad and Molnar, 1999]. Here we show that delamination for cratonic lithosphere with chemically buoyant root and non-Newtonian rheology, different from that for normal lithosphere that was considered in most previous geodynamic studies, is episodic and multi-staged and may last for tens to 100 Myrs. For cratonic lithosphere with non-Newtonian rheology with relatively large chemical buoyancy, the cold, shallow part of the lithosphere goes unstable first, causing significant stirring and mixing of asthenospheric mantle and cratonic lithosphere. This delamination process may explain the main geochemical signatures in the Jurassic and Cretaceous volcanic rocks found in the NCC including their eclogite component [Gao et al., 2004, 2008] and sourcing both cratonic lithosphere and asthenosphere [Zheng et al., 2000]. Subduction process, by increasing tectonic stress and water content, helps reduce the lithospheric viscosity sufficiently to delaminate the entire lithosphere.