SE Asia as part of Gondwana: a 1960s regional mapping project over Southern Thailand that lay behind the hypothesis

Abstract

Abstract In the 1960s, anticipating the award of concessions in the Gulf of Thailand, BP carried out reconnaissance geological mapping over all of Southern Thailand including its Gulf islands. The resulting eight geological maps at 1:250 000 scale provided a database that underpinned discussions of Thailand's place in global plate-tectonic reconstructions that were emerging at that time. In particular, new light was thrown on the Paleozoic succession, and important differences were found between the Upper Thai Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula (respectively, NW and SE of the prominent bend in the peninsula's outline). The Phuket Group of the Upper Peninsula is a very thick diamictite-bearing succession of possible Devonian to Early Permian age, apparently sourced in the west, a region now occupied by the Indian Ocean. That in turn suggested a possible Gondwana origin for SE Asia, a contentious concept at the time, but one that is now widely accepted. The emphasis of field mapping these days is on obtaining detailed data that necessarily means over areas of limited extent. But a very broad regional mapping project such as BP's in Thailand revealed stratigraphic and tectonic insights that could be revealed only from a wide-ranging regional study of this kind.