AA’: The Philippines Sea Plate is subducting beneath the East China Sea Shelf under

the Ryukyu Trench and developing a trough structure known as the Okinwa Trough. A

huge sedimentary stratum is being deposited on the East China Sea Shelf in the

Cenozoic time that makes the upper part underlain by Pre-Cambrian Basement and

some volcanic rocks. The subduction zone goes beyond a hundred kilometers in the

mantle to make the melt happen. The crustal thickness on the Overriding plate side is

around 30 Km which decreases to lesser thickness where the rifting is on the go and

increases again where the arc is developed above the sea level because of which the

crust roots to a relatively deeper level making the Moho Boundary further deeper. At

the given N-S section, the Philippine sea plate develop a subduction zone of which

the direction is north facing. The Ryukyu trench-arc-back-arc system, Okinawa

Trough, Ryukyu Arc and Ryukyu Trench, is an actively continent margin between the

Eurasia plate and the Philippine Sea. The Okinawa Trough goes from SW Kyushu in

the NE to Taiwan in the SW. It is only 60-100 km wide in the south and reaches up to

230 km width to the north. Highest depth of the body of water is 2.3 km in the south

and gradually reduces to 0.2km to the north.

BB’: This section represents the general stratigraphic trend across throughout the

Taiwan in WE direction covering the key geological provinces in Taiwan from east

covering the Taiwan Strait geology all the way towards east including Coastal Ranges,

Western Foothills, Central Ranges, Coastal Ranges, the volcanic arc portion of the

Luzon Arc and further into the oceanic crust of the Philippines sea plate. This figure

also represents the tectonic transport direction of both the plates around and beneath

the Taiwan with a little oblique angle to each other. The volcanic rocks of the eastern

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shelf stratigraphy are also accessible on the eastern part of the Taiwan orogen which is

quite intriguing and challenging to study. Also. The prominent feature in the section is

the deepest Moho Boundary beneath the Central Range of Taiwan at around 50 Km

where the anomaly of the gravity tends to go positive that is quite strange however, it

is found that this anomaly of gravity is because of high density strata in the middle of

crust (Lin and Watts., 2002). It is evident that sedimentary strata are being underlain

by the volcanic rocks and metavolcanics. The rock types found in Taiwan also

include, low grade metamorphic complexes, metapelites, and sedimentary sequence of

rocks. The tectonic situation of Taiwan recently is Arc-Continental collision tectonics

which has been mentioned and explained in details stepwise by multiple authors since

decades. Between the central range and the coastal range is the longitudinal valley

fault that separates the volcanic segment of sediments all the way from the central

range of rocks on its west.

CC’: In this part of the section, the Philippines plate overrides the South China Sea

oceanic crust carrying the Eurasian Continent. Volcanic arc developed due to the

melting of the subducted slab is called as Luzon Arc part of which is also extended in

the southeastern part of Taiwan all across with volcanic rock bodies. Along Manila

Trench, this subduction is taking place developing some accretionary prism because

of the scrapping of the subducting slab with the overriding plate of the Philippines

sea. Accretionary prism developed here is in a shape of ridge also known as the

Hengchun Ridge. Philippines sea plate has multiple dimensions of subductions along

with multiple senses of motion that makes the tectonic belt in between Philippines sea

plate and Eurasian plate very complex geologically. Occurrence of diverse

earthquakes especially in Taiwan can be attributed to these multidimensional

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tectonics. The source of sediments that infills the trench area is from the South China

sea which fills more in the southern part compared to the northern part and it is also

expected that these sediments come from the erosion of Taiwan mountain belt (Ku

and Hsu., 2009).