Provenance of the Upper Cretaceous to Lower Tertiary Sedimentary Relicts in the Renbu Mélange Zone, within the Indus-Yarlung Suture Zone

Abstract

The Upper Cretaceous to Lower Tertiary sediments in the Indus-Yarlung suture zone provide critical records on the history of accretion along the southern margin of Asia prior to, and during, the India-Asia collision. In this article, we report field and petrographic observations, in situ detrital zircon U-Pb ages, Lu-Hf isotopic analyses, and Cr-spinel electron microprobe data from the Upper Cretaceous to Lower Tertiary sedimentary rocks of the Renbu mélange zone in east Xigaze, southern Tibet. The Renbu mélange zone consists of two serpentinite mélange subzones separated by a mud-matrix mélange. Using similarities found in the compositions of detrital Cr-spinels and detrital zircon U-Pb age..