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doi:10.14379/iodp.sp.355.2014

Abstract

Interactions between the solid Earth and climate system represent a frontier area for geoscientific research that is strongly emphasized in the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Science Plan. The continental margin of India adjoining the Arabian Sea offers a unique opportunity to understand tectonic-climatic interactions and the net impact of these on weathering and erosion of the Himalaya. Scientific drilling in the Arabian Sea is designed to understand the coevolution of mountain building, weathering, erosion, and climate over a range of timescales. The southwest monsoon is one of the most intense climatic phenomena on Earth. Its long-term development has been linked to the growth of high topography in South and Central Asia. Conversely, the tectonic evolution of the Himalaya, especially the exhumation of the Greater Himalaya, has been linked to intensification of the summer monsoon rains, as well as to plate tectonic forces. Weathering of the Himalaya has also been linked to long-term drawdown of atmospheric CO₂ during the Cenozoic, culminating in the onset of Northern Hemisphere glaciation. No other part of the world has such intense links between tectonic and climatic processes. Unfortunately, these hypotheses remain largely untested because of limited information on the history of erosion and weathering recorded in the resultant sedimentary prisms. This type of data cannot be found on shore because the proximal foreland basin records are disrupted by major unconformities, and depositional ages are difficult to determine with high precision. We therefore propose to recover longer records of erosion and weathering from the Indus Fan that will allow us to understand links between paleoceanographic processes and the climatic history of the region. The latter was partially addressed by Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 117 on the Oman margin, and further studies are proposed during IODP Expedition 353 (Indian Monsoon Rainfall) that will core several sites in the Bay of Bengal. Such records can be correlated to structural geological and thermochronology data in the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau to estimate how sediment fluxes and exhumation rates change through time. The drilling will be accomplished within a regional seismic stratigraphic framework and will for the first time permit an estimation of sediment budgets together with quantitative estimates of weathering fluxes and their variation through time. Specific goals of this expedition include

1. Testing whether the timing of the exhumation of Greater Himalaya correlates with an enhanced erosional flux and stronger chemical weathering after ~23 Ma,

2. Determining the amplitude and direction of the environmental change at 8 Ma, and

3. Dating the age of the base of the fan and the underlying basement to constrain the timing of India-Asia collision.

Drilling through the fan base and into the underlying basement in the proposed area will permit additional constraints to be placed on the nature of the crust in the Laxmi Basin (Eastern Arabian Sea), which has a significant bearing on paleogeographic reconstructions along conjugate margins in the Arabian Sea and models of continental breakup on rifted volcanic margins.

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