Home – Home – Jornals – Russian Geology and Geophysics 2002 number 5

Altai in the Cenozoic structural framework of Central Asia is a zone of crystal breccia surrounded by more stable large blocks. The mobile zone is expressed in the surface topography as mountains and the stable blocks as plains. The sedimentary section of the latter includes Permian, Jurassic, and Quaternary molasse, which attests to structural inheritance from the older framework. The Late Paleozoic and Middle Mesozoic activity stages were associated with strike-slip faulting and granitoid magmatism, there is no evidence for granite intrusion in the Cenozoic yet.
Altai is bounded by reactivated Paleozoic master faults, but the neotectonics within the province does not show such an obvious relation to Paleozoic structures. Spatial correlation of large Cenozoic faults in southeastern Russian Altai with Paleozoic faults of the same scale shows that the recent faults result from reactivation of older fractures over less than a half of their total length. The reactivation involved WE trending segments of most of major faults, and many blocks of metamorphic rocks underwent uplifting.