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International audience; Surface, seismic, and borehole data characterize the Neogene-Recent Tajik fold-and-thrust belt of the Tajik basin. The basin experienced little sub-detachment basement deformation, acting as a rigid foreland plate during the Pamir orogeny. The Tajik fold-and-thrust belt contains variable thinskinned structural styles, changing along and across strike as a function of the thickness and facies of Upper Jurassic evaporites, which constitute the basal detachment, and the influence of the surrounding thickskinned belts. The southern Tajik fold-and-thrust belt shows regularly spaced, salt-cored, thrusted detachment anticlines that transition northward into imbricated thrust sheets grouped in oppositely verging stacks facing each other across a common footwall syncline. The width of the fold-and-thrust belt decreases northeastward accommodated by the Ilyak fault, a lateral ramp developed over a seismically active dextral basement fault. The southeastern Tajik fold-and-thrust belt contains massive subaerial salt sheets, formed by squeezing of preexisting salt diapirs. The salt-tectonic domain originates from a local depocenter within the Late Jurassic Amu Darya-Tajik evaporitic basin. Serial cross sections, integrating the structural geometries, yielded minimum thinskinned shortening oriented at~90°to the India-Asia convergence direction, increasing from~93 km in the south to~148 km in the center, and dropping tõ 22 km in the northeast; total shortening-including the foreland buttress-is ≥170 km. Most of the shortening in the central-southern Tajik fold-and-thrust belt occurred by hinterland-vergent, high-displacement back thrusts. The Pamir played a dominant role in the transfer of shortening to the sedimentary infill of the Tajik basin with the Tian Shan acting as a semi-passive buttress.

The amalgamation of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt in the southwestern Tian Shan in Tajikistan is represented by tectono-magmatic-metamorphic processes that accompanied late Paleozoic ocean closure and collision between the Karakum–Tarim and Kazakh–Kyrgyz terranes. Integrated U-Pb geochronology, thermobarometry, pseudosection modelling, and Hf geochemistry constrain the timing and petro-tectonic nature of these processes. The Gissar batholith and the Garm massif represent an eastward, along-strike increase in paleodepth from upper-batholith (~21–7 km) to arc-root (~36–19 km) levels of the Andean–syn-collisional Gissar arc, which developed from ~323–288 Ma in two stages: (i) Andean, I-type granitoid magmatism from ~323–306 Ma due to northward subduction of the Gissar back-arc ocean basin under the Gissar microcontinent, which was immediately followed by: (ii) syn-collisional, I–S-type granitoid magmatism in the Gissar batholith and the Garm massif from ~304–288 Ma due to northward subduction/underthrusting of Karakum marginal-continental crust under the Gissar microcontinent. A rapid isotopic pull-up from ~288–286 Ma signals the onset of juvenile, alkaline-syenitic, post-collisional magmatism by ~280 Ma, which was driven by delamination of the Gissar arclogite root and consequent convective asthenospheric upwelling. Whereas M–HT/LP prograde metamorphism in the Garm massif (650–750 °C / 6–7 kbar) from ~310–288 Ma was associated with subduction-magma inundation and crustal thickening, HT/LP heating and decompression to peak-metamorphic temperatures (~800–820 °C / 6–4 kbar) at ~288 ± 6 Ma was driven by the transmission of a post-collisional, mantle-derived heat wave through the Garm-massif crust.

Along the Ghissar-Alai Range of the southwestern Tian Shan (southwestern Kyrgyzstan, northern Tajikistan), the deformation front of the India-Asia collision—the Pamir-Tibet orogen—is interacting with the intra-continental Tian Shan orogen without the intervening Tarim Craton. Apatite fission-track (n = 33, ~3.3–145.6 Ma, 27%