China paleogeography: Current status and future challenges

Abstract Paleogeographic maps, especially when overlain on reconstructions of ancient plate positions, represent the culmination of geoscience field mapping, basin drilling, geophysical research and methods of interpretation and correlation. During the past century, Chinese geoscientists have progressively compiled and revised many depositional facies maps from the scale of individual basins to nationwide syntheses for different slices of geologic time. However, the most recent comprehensive national compilation spanning the entire Phanerozoic was in 1985, and the most recent national compilation that spans only the Paleozoic was in 2010 (Zheng, Hu, et al., 2010; which is partly reproduced in the Supplementary materials). A major challenge is to place these facies maps of the numerous individual blocks into the larger contexts of moving plates and of their relationships to adjoining regions, especially for the diverse opinions on pre-Triassic plate tectonic models of Southeast Asia. There are many challenges in compiling the paleogeography of China in the context of Southeast Asia, especially prior to the Permian. A multi-institutional coordinated paleogeography program with user-friendly shared databases and visualization outputs from the basin- to inter-national scale is a major goal in China and Southeast Asia stratigraphy and geophysical research.