The Earth’s crust of the deep platform basins in the Northern Eurasia and their origin

Abstract

Several large basins with a depth up to 15–20 km are revealed in the platform regions of Northern Eurasia—the Pre-Caspian, Vilyui, Pur-Gydan, and Kara–Barents platforms. All these basins have two structural features in common: they all have a rounded shape with steep walls and are marked with the reduced thickness of the Earth’s crust. With the basins' depth of 15–20 km, the basement top is flat and has an almost horizontal surface. The basins differ by the average seismic velocities in the crystalline crust which vary from 6.2–64 to 6.8–7.0 km/s. Another distinction is the type of the crystalline crust ranging from continental with a thick granite-gneiss layer to suboceanic, represented by the basite layer. For explaining the formation of these basins, we suggest a combined petrophysical model which includes several geodynamical processes of different intensity: rifting, basification, and eclogitization of the Earth’s crust.The model also takes into account the process of material outflow from beneath a basin through the midcrustal layer of increased porosity and fluid saturation. This accounts for the strong reduction of the granite-gneiss layer with the preservation of the basement’s flat surface and for the formation of significant source areas of clastic material around the basin. The formation of these basins requires an extensive and sufficiently laterally uniform and longoperating energy source. The intrusion of the mantle material saturated with fluids into the bottom portions of the crust or, simply, the long-lasting inflow of the deep fluids are the most probable sources of this kind.