The West Pacific regime is dominated by a convergent plate setting, but develops two thirds of the world’s marginal basins which have different histories and causes. Some are built on continental crust and some formed by seafloor spreading. Some began to form in Mesozoic time and others began in Cenozoic time. Many are filled with sediments and volcanics and some of these contain hydrocarbon deposits. Some are no longer actively extending but others are still tectonically active and pose hazards to nearby coastal communities. The purpose of this session is to present our modern understanding of these marginal basins, how they formed, how they subsided, how they were filled, how they died, and the economic benefits and potential hazards they present.
In this session, we welcome all contributions that deal with marginal basins in the West Pacific and/or try to answer to the questions related to the evolution of marginal basins in convergent plate settings. We particularly encourage multi-disciplinary studies that address the issues of inheritance on the rifting process, the discuss modes of breakup, the role of magmatism in lithospheric breakup and the contribution of sedimentation and source to sink processes in marginal margins.