A Special Issue Devoted to the Accretionary and Collisional Tectonics of the Altaids and its Metallogeny: Preface

Abstract

Altaids: The conception The Altaids is tectonically sandwiched between the Baltica and Siberia cratons to the north and the Tarim and North China cratons to the south (Şengör et al., 1993). This huge orogen has been also called the Altaid collage (Yakubchuk, 2004), Central Asian Orogenic Belt (CAOB) (Jahn et al., 2000a), or Central Asian Orogenic System (Briggs et al., 2007). Long before these terms, the Altaids even had been called the Asian Foldbelt, Ural-Mongolian Foldbelt, or Ural-Amurian Foldbelt, mostly by the former Soviet Union scientists (Yakubchuk, 2004). Since the advent of Plate Tectonics, “foldbelt” has been gradually abandoned in the international community. There are, however, some differences between the concept of the Altaids (Altaid orogenic collage) and the Central Asian Orogenic Belt and other terms, ie., the Altaids does not include the Proterozoic orogens along the southern margins of the Baltica and Siberia cratons while the CAOB and other terms include these Proterozoic orogens (Windley et al., 2007). Although the Altaids and CAOB have been used in the international community widely, their southern part in China has been integrally called the Tianshan-Xingmeng orogen (He et al., 1994; Zhang and Wang, 1996; Li et al., 2011), Beifang (Northern China) orogen (Wu et al., 1998). In the meantime, other individual orogens are also used in the international community, such as the Altai, (West, or Western; East, or Eastern) Junggar, (West, or Western; East, or Eastern; North, Middle, South) Tianshan, Beishan, Alxa, Inner Mongolia, and Great Hing’anorogens (Gao et al., 1995; Li, 2006; Sun et al., 2007; Mao et al., 2012; Song et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2017; Zheng et al., 2017). The term Altaids, firstly proposed by Eduard Suess in 1901, emphasizes a unique orogenic process very different from the classically conceived linear/arcuate, narrow orogens (Şengör et al., 1993).The Altaids was brought to the international community again with the development of accretionary orogenesis in early 1990’s, which which records considerable continental growth in the Phanerozoic (Şengör et al., 1993; Li et al., 2012; Li et al., 2013; Ao et al., 2016). For the sake of avoiding misunderstanding in the international community, we generally use the Altaids for the entire orogenic collages in China and its adjacent areas, but keep the tradition of using individual orogen names since the Altaids covers a vast area in Central Asia (Feng et al., 1989; Zhou et al., 2009; Zheng et al., 2013; Kröner et al., 2014; Xiao et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2015; Xiao et al., 2018).