Abstract
The western edge of the Pacific plate is marked by a chain of back arc basins stretching from the Aleutians, through Japan and the Philippines to New Zealand. Most of the basins lie behind volcanic island arcs far from continents and are the result of extension of the oceanic lithosphere1. But the Japan Sea is bounded on one side by continental crust (the Sikhote Alin and Korean Peninsula of the Asian continent) and on the other by an active arc with continental fragments. It can thus be said to be associated more with continental rifting1–4 than with oceanic processes. We report here palaeomagnetic data from the Japan arc which indicate that, since the early Miocene, north-east Japan has rotated counter-clockwise through 47° around a vertical axis while south-west Japan has rotated clockwise through 56° (refs 5–8). We attribute this differential rotation, which took place concurrently between 21 and 11 Myr ago, to the back arc opening of the Japan Sea8 with a ‘double-door’ mode, that is, there are two fan-shaped spreading basins facing each other. Such a fan-shaped opening is probably peculiar to the geological phenomenon of rifting of a continental fragment from thick continental lithosphere.
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Otofuji, YI., Matsuda, T. & Nohda, S. Opening mode of the Japan Sea inferred from the palaeomagnetism of the Japan Arc. Nature 317, 603–604 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1038/317603a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/317603a0
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