Preliminary conclusions of the Royal Society and Academia Sinica 1985 geotraverse of Tibet

The preliminary fieldwork results of a geological traverse across the high Tibetan plateau during June and July 1985 are presented. An effort was made to investigate the origin and chronology of successive collisions of continental fragments with Laurasian or Gondwanian provenance, and to ascertain how the crust of Tibet was thickened. The traverse followed the 1150-km-long Lhasa-Golmud highway; the pre-Cenzoic geology of the region is described from north to south.