The basin-and-range area in eastern North China is known for frequent occurrence of earthquakes, their great magnitudes and heavy losses thereby incurred. Seismic studies in the past usually emphasized the intersections, inflexions and branches of the faults. However, the intensities of many great earthquakes in this area do not show linear distribution, and the epicenters are horizontally dispersed at certain depths instead of along the strike of faults. Based on the sub-mantle plume studies made by authors in the past decade, it is thought that there exists an uplifted sub-mantle plume under the fault depression area in North China. The uplifting and intrusion of mantle materials caused the upper crust to be faulted, while low-velocity and high-velocity layers are alternatively distributed in the middle crust under the influence of the mantle and the lower crust. The middle and lower crust materials were detached from the top of the sub-mantle plume to the surroundings while the sub-mantle plume materials were detached outward. When the detached middle and lower crust come to the boundary of fault basins in the upper crust, they will be obstructed by the orogenic zone and the detachment will go slower. The shearing between them will cause the stress to accumulate and release alternatively, so that earthquakes occurred frequently in the areas of sub-mantle plume and its surroundings.
The basin-range coupling relation is a leading subject of the modern geology. In geometry, relations of this type include couplings between stretched orogenic belt and down-faulted basin, compressional orogenic belt and foreland basin, strike-slip orogenic belt and strike-slip basin and so on. Fault chains are the key for these couplings and there are typical examples for all these cases. The North China down-faulted basin is coupled west with the Taihang uplift, east with the Jiao-Liao Mountains, north with the Yanshan orogenic belt and south with the Dabie orogenic belt, that is to say, the central down-faulted basin and the surrounding orogenic belts bear a coupling relation within a uniform dynamistic system. Study shows that the central down-faulted basin and the North China mantle sub-plume structure have a close relation during their formation. Owing to intensive mantle sub-plume uplifting, the bottom of the lithosphere suffered from resistance, which caused the lithosphere of the eastern North China to be heated, thinned and fault-depressed. Meanwhile, mantle rocks that were detached outwards in the shape of mushroom was dissected by surrounding ductile shearing zones, which lead to decompression and unloading to generate hypomagmas, and a series of mantle-branch structures were formed around the down-faulted basin. There is an obvious comparability among these mantle branch structures (orogenic belts), and they have basin-range coupling relations with the central down-faulted basins.
