Kurosegawa Terrane as a Transform Fault Zone in Southwest Japan

The Kurosegawa Terrane intervening in the Jurassic-Early Cretaceous accretionary complexes along the Pacific side of the SW Japanese Islands is a serpentinite mélange zone. It contains various kinds of exotic rocks, for example, granitoids, metamorphic rocks, Siluro-Devonian deposits and is intimately associated with Cretaceous forearc basin deposits. The terrane is regarded as a key to clarify the Mesozoic geotectonic history of the western circum-Pacific orogenic belts. The current model, in which the formation of the Kurosegawa Terrane is attributed to nappe-movement or sinistral strike-slip faulting, can explain neither the mode of occurrence of the Kurosegawa Terrane we observed in eastern Kii Peninsula nor the array of evidence obtained from the Ryoke Terrane southward to the Shimanto Terrane. We suggest a new hypothesis in which the Kurosegawa Terrane was a transform fault zone that originated because of oceanic ridge subduction along the southern margin of the coeval accretionary prism (Butsuzo T.L.) in the late Early Cretaceous. Our model is mainly based on new geological evidence from the Kurosegawa Terrane in eastern Kii Peninsula where the deepest erosion level is exposed due to neotectonic uplift.