Active subduction and collision in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia is an actively deforming area located on the junction of the converging Eurasian, Indo-Australian and Philippine Sea plates, where collision between arcs and continents played an important role. Studies of the geodynamic evolution of Southeast Asia have resulted, based on the extensive data sets from geological, palaeomagnetic and shallow seismic studies, in a number of tectonic reconstructions. The very existence of the various reconstructions indicates that the currently incorporated data do not allow definition of one single scenario for the tectonic evolution. Consequently, there are some important-as yet unresolved-differences between the reconstructed surface motions within the Southeast Asia region. Despite its relatively small size, the Taiwan arc-continent collision is probably one of the most actively studied in the world, because the collision zone is young (a few million years), extremely active, easily accessible and well monitored through geological, geophysical, geodetic and remote sensing approaches.