Coupling Relationship between Pearl River Water System Evolution and East Asian Terrain Inversion

The Tibetan Uplift and its corresponding environmental effect are widely considered as one of the most significant global geological events during the Cenozoic. Specifically, the generation of loess and continental-scale drainage networks within the East Asia has attracted increasing attention. As the link connecting the South China Continent and the northern South China Sea (SCS) of the "source-to-sink" system, the Pearl River is the focus of sedimentology and petroleum geology research. Its evolutionary process and controlling factors are of great significance in revealing the landform development of both Yunnan-Guizhou Uplift and SE Tibetan margin. Based on the combination of elemental geochemistry and detrital zircon U-Pb dating results, in this paper it provides a research synthesis of the Pearl River tributaries and the Pearl River Mouth Basin to unravel the birth and development history of the Pearl River system in detail. The Pearl River system was initially formed in the Early Oligocene, and the drainage basin was limited to the South China coastal areas. In the Late Oligocene, the Pearl River eroded westward greatly reaching the eastern margin of the Yunnan-Guizhou uplift. Since the Miocene, the Pearl River largely expanded westward and northward, and deeply cut across gorges within the hinterland of the Yunnan-Guizhou uplift. Since then, the Pearl River has established its general framework over the South China Continent. The rapid expansion of the Pearl River at the Oligocene/Miocene boundary (23 Ma) is in consistence with the contemporaneous Three Gorges connection of the Yangtze River and the loess formation. These events are not only closely related to the dramatic uplift of the Tibetan Plateau during this time, but also substantial geological records of the west-high-east-low landform generation in the East Asia region.