Artificial Intelligence in Geosciences (Dec 2022)
A study on geological structure prediction based on random forest method
Abstract
The Xingmeng orogenic belt is located in the eastern section of the Central Asian orogenic belt, which is one of the key areas to study the formation and evolution of the Central Asian orogenic belt. At present, there is a huge controversy over the closure time of the Paleo-Asian Ocean in the Xingmeng orogenic belt. One of the reasons is that the genetic tectonic setting of the Carboniferous volcanic rocks is not clear. Due to the diversity of volcanic rock geochemical characteristics and its related interpretations, there are two different views on the tectonic setting of Carboniferous volcanic rocks in the Xingmeng orogenic belt: island arc and continental rift. In recent years, it is one of the important development directions in the application of geological big data technology to analyze geochemical data based on machine learning methods and further infer the tectonic background of basalt. This paper systematically collects Carboniferous basic rock data from Dongwuqi area of Inner Mongolia, Keyouzhongqi area of Inner Mongolia and Beishan area in the southern section of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt. Random forest algorithm is used for training sets of major elements and trace elements in global island arc basalt and rift basalt, and then the trained model is used to predict the tectonic setting of the Carboniferous magmatic rock samples in the Xingmeng orogenic belt. The prediction results shows that the island arc probability of most of the research samples is between 0.65 and 1, which indicates that the island arc tectonic setting is more credible. In this paper, it is concluded that magmatism in the Beishan area of the southern part of the Central Asian Orogenic belt in the Early Carboniferous may have formed in the heyday of subduction, while the Xingmeng orogenic belt in the Late Carboniferous may have been in the late subduction stage to the collision or even the early rifting stage. This temporal and spatial evolution shows that the subduction of the Paleo-Asian Ocean is different from west to east. Therefore, the research results of this paper show that the subduction of the Xingmeng orogenic belt in the Carboniferous has not ended yet.
