南海张裂大陆边缘数值模拟研究

The South China Sea (SCS) is one of the largest marginal seas in the western Pacific, which is located at the junction of Eurasian plate, Pacific plate and Indian-Australian plate. It was formed by continent breakup and sea-floor spreading in Cenozoic. The complicated interaction among the three major plates made tectonic movement complex and geological phenomena very rich in this area. The SCS is an ideal place to study the formation and evolution of rifted continental margin and sea-floor spreading since it is old enough to have experienced the major stages of the basin evolution but still young enough to have preserved its original nature. As the demand for energy grows day by day in our country, the deep water region of the northern continental margin in the SCS has become a focus of oil and gas exploration because of its huge hydrocarbon potential. Therefore, to study the rifted continental margin of the SCS not only can improve our understanding of the formation and evolution processes of rifted continental margin, but also can provide theoretical support for hydrocarbon exploration in rifted continental margin. This dissertation mainly includes five topics as follows: (1) Various classic lithosphere stretching models are reviewed, and the continuous non-uniform stretching model is modified to make it suitable for the case where the extension of lithopheric mantle exceeds that of the crust. Then simple/pure shear flexural cantilever model is applied to model the basement geometries of SO49-18 profile in the northern continental margin of the SCS. By fitting the basements obtained by using 2DMove software with modeling results, it is found that the reasonable effective elastic thickness is less than 5km in this region. According to this result, it is assumed that there is weak lower crust in the northern continental margin in the SCS. (2) We research on the methods for stretching factor estimation based on various lithosphere stretching models, and apply the method based on multiple finite rifting model to estimate the stretching factors of several wells and profiles in the northern continental margin of the SCS. (3) We improve one-dimension strain rate inversion method with conjugate gradient method, and apply it to invert the strain rate of several wells in the northern continental margin of the SCS. Two-dimension strain rate forward modeling is carried out, and the modeling results show that effective elastic thickness is a key parameter to control basin’s geometry. (4) We simulate divergent upwelling mantle flow model using finite difference method, and apply this newly developed model to examine the formation mechanism of the northwest and central sub-basin in the SCS. (5) We inverse plate thickness and basal temperature of oceanic lithosphere using sea-floor ages and bathymetries of the North Pacific and the North Atlantic based on varied-parameters plate model, in which the heat conductivity, heat capacity and coefficient of thermal expansion depend on temperature or depth. A new empirical formula is put forward based the inversed parameters, which depicts the relation among sea-floor age, bathymetry and heat flow. Then various similar empirical formulae, including the newly developed one, are applied to examine the sea-floor spread issue in the SCS based on the heat flow and bathymetry data of the abyssal sub-basin.