The Tibetan Plateau was formed by intense Cenozoic shortening (up to 1100 km) of a composite “proto-Tibet”, itself the product of a long Paleozoic and Mesozoic history of accretion of Gondwana-derived continental fragments and volcanic arcs against the Asian continental margin. The difficult access and the scarcity of outcrops have long limited the possibilities of studying these Mesozoic suture zones in the heart of the Plateau. In this work, we present new U-Pb and 40Ar/39Ar ages from the highly deformed units of the Yushu mélange, along the Jinsha Suture in the northeastern Qiangtang terrane. Early Triassic (c. 253 Ma) to Middle Jurassic ages (c. 165 Ma) complement the existing dataset and help to refine the chronology of the Paleo-Tethyan oceanic subductions which have structured the northeastern part of the Qiangtang terrane. The Yushu mélange records at least three successive tectono-magmatic events. The opening of a back-arc basin during the northward Paleo-Tethyan subduction along the Longmu Co-Shuanghu Suture during Early to Middle Triassic; then its closure during the southward subduction of the Songpan-Ganze Ocean along the Jinsha Suture in Late Triassic. Finally, a shortening phase related to the continental collision of the Songpan-Ganze and Qiangtang blocks from Late Triassic to Early-Middle Jurassic. No evidence for any high- or mid-temperature Cenozoic reactivation of the Jinsha suture in our study area is recorded.

In a recent paper, Gerritsen et al. (2022) propose to modify the well-accepted sampling strategy in paleomagnetism by collecting more single-sample sites. They also argue that the paleomagnetic community commonly applies a loosely defined set of quantitative data filters and that there is no need for an expert-eye to analyze and interpret paleomagnetic data. Many paleomagnetists will disagree with these claims as paleomagnetic methods provide very robust results at the site level when the study is done with sufficient rigor. As stated in Gerritsen et al. (2022) they deliberately kept directions that an experienced paleomagnetist would likely immediately discard as unreliable. Can we really draw conclusions from such an approach to paleomagnetism? The strategy proposed by Gerritsen et al. (2022) has serious drawbacks well illustrated by the datasets from Turkey (van Hinsbergen et al., 2010), Mongolia (van Hinsbergen et al., 2008), Norway (Haldan et al., 2014), and Antarctica (Asefaw et al., 2021) used by Gerritsen et al. (2022). The main objective of this comment is to support standard methods (Butler, 1992; Tauxe et al., 2018) for a well-defined determination of the paleomagnetic direction per site based on the sampling of several samples per site.