Along the western Kunlun-Tarim-Tianshan geoscience transect in the northwestern China, an integrated geophysical investigation was carried out. Owing to the abominable natural conditions there, the sounding profile could not cross the whole transect, consequentially, a variety of velocity structures in the transverse and vertical orientations beneath the whole transect were not obtained, such as the case within the western Kunlun orogenic belt. To supply a gap of deep seismic soundings within the western Kunlun orogenic belt, we used the Bouguer gravity anomaly data and the relationship between the compressive wave and the density to obtain the density structure of the crust beneath the western Kunlun and the southern Tarim basin by a forward fitting of gravity anomalies within the two-dimensional polygonal model of uniform medium. The crust of the Tarim basin with a rigid basement was like an asymmetrical arc, whose surface feature was the Bachu uplift in the middle of the Tarim basin. Beneath the conjoint area between the Tarim basin and the western Kunlun belt, there was a V-shape structure located just up to the top of the uplifted Moho. The multi-seismological structures jointly revealed that the face-to-face continent-continent collision beneath the western Kunlun is a new structural style within the continent-continent collision zone, which is a real model proved by the numerical modeling.
The Himalayan-Tibetan orogen is the youngest and arguably most spectacular of all the continent-continent collisional belts on the Earth. There are not only north-south extrusions but also east-west extensions in the Tibetan Plateau. All these phenomena are the results of the Indian plate subducting into the Eurasia plate about 70 Ma ago （Yin and Harrison, 2000）, but the deep dynamics mechanism is still an enigma. Exploring the crust and upper mantle structure of Tibetan plateau and revealing the process and the effect of collision are crucial for solving the puzzle of the Tibet uplift and the continent-continent collision. This research is based on the data from the 360km-long Dagze-Deqen-Domar profile, which can be divided into two sections. The Dagze-Deqen section traverses the Nyainqntanglha Mountains and the Yadong-Gulu rift, the biggest rift in the Tibet. The Deqen-Domar section crosses Lhasa terrane and Qiangtang terrane. We study the transverse density structure of the crust and mantle beneath the Dagze-Deqen-Domar profile using a joint gravity-seismic inversion technique in order to obtain the Moho and the asthenospheric configuration beneath the profile and understand the deep dynamics mechanism of the Yadong-Gulu rift.
