The extent of igneous rocks of the South China Sea based on the correlational analyses of gravity and magnetic data

<p>The South China Sea is the biggest conjugate marginal sea in the West Pacific Ocean, which is influenced by the Eurasian plate, the Pacific plate, and the Indo-Australian plate. There have developed continental tectonic margins with different characters after experiencing subduction, collision, strike-slip and so on since the Mesozoic and Cenozoic (Yao et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2014). However, the igneous rock can be regarded as a recorder to reveal some information of evolution and deep geodynamics of the South China Sea, which helps us to improve understanding of the continental rifting, the seafloor spreading, the formation of deep water basins and the process of hydrocarbon accumulation(Zhang et al., 2016).<br>The igneous rocks are studied by multiple types of data that are magnetic data, seismic profiles, and drilling data in the previous studies. Hence, there are bunch of research results about the igneous rocks that contain the reason and time of formation, the distribution of space, the period of eruption in the north of the South China Sea because of the abundant datasets (Zou et al., 1993,1995; Zhou et al., Yan and Liu, 2005; Xu et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016), in addition, the Pearl River Mouth Basin is the most famous one among all of the basins in the South China Sea. However, the researchs related to the south of the South China Sea where are the deep-sea are far less knowledgeable about the distribution of the igneous rocks than the north because of the limitation of datasets that are poor quality and less quantity (Yao et al., 2004; Li et al., 2010; Hui et al., 2016), which lead to the less researches with respect to the big area of the South China Sea.<br>The followings can be concluded from the previous studies. The northern and continental margin of the South China Sea are distributed by Cenozoic extrusive rocks with high susceptibility and low density and Yanshanian intrusive rocks with low susceptibility and density (Hao et al., 2009; Lu et al., 2011; Hui et al., 2016), the Central Sub-basin is covered by Cenozoic extrusive rocks (Yan and Liu, 2005; Hui et al., 2016), however, there are few distributions of the Yanshanian intrusive rocks in the Southern South China Sea (Zhang et al., 2015; Hui et al., 2016). In this study, a new method, the fusion of gravity and magnetic data, is applied to detect the distribution of the igneous rocks in order to provide more geophysical data in the South China Sea.</p>