With the completion of the Ganzhou-Shenzhen High-speed Railway as a major north-south transportation artery, and the realization of the 30-minute interchange between Huizhou and Shenzhen, Huizhou has become an important ‘population magnet’city in the Greater Bay Area. During the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, its GDP grew at an average annual rate of around 5.5%, reaching 497.736 billion yuan in 2021, with a growth rate of 10.1%. It ranked second in the Pearl River Delta region and third in the entire province in terms of growth rate [Guangdong Statistical Yearbook (2022)]. Through investigations, it was found that the geothermal resources in Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, are mainly concentrated in Huidong County and Boluo County. In Huidong County, the resources are primarily distributed in the towns of Fengren, Baihua, Pingshan, Dalin, and Longmen, with Pingshan Town being the most abundant. In Boluo County, the resources are mainly distributed in the towns of Xijiang, Longhua, Yuanzhou, and Luoyang, with Xijiang Town being the most abundant.
However, despite the abundance of geothermal resources(Fig. 2), the current development and utilization methods in Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, remain inefficient. The level of resource exploration is low, and the development and utilization forms are limited to the construction of hot spring tourism as the sole approach[15].
In order to obtain more detailed data, we selected the Huangsha Cave-Shiba area as the study area and employed various methods for data collection and compilation, including geological investigations, geophysical surveys, geochemical surveys, remote sensing detection, and drilling exploration.
The Huangsha Cave-Shiba area in Huizhou is located at the southern margin of the Cathaysia Block. It is situated within the Meixian-Huiyang sag sedimentary area, bounded by the northeast-trending He Yuan deep fault zone inclined towards the southeast and the northeast-trending Lianhua Mountain deep fault zone inclined towards the northwest (part of the Zhenghe-Dapu Fault southern segment) (Fig. 3.1a, 1b).
The study area exhibits well-developed fold and fault structures. The basement folds are represented by the Baishi Syncline, with a northeast-trending axis(Fig. 4a). The orientations of the overlying fold structures are predominantly northeast-trending, with subordinate east-west, northwest, and north-south trends. Representative examples include the Aibei compound syncline with a northeast-trending axis, the Shimen anticline with a northwest-trending axis, the Zhaoyuan syncline with an almost north-south-trending axis, and the Baoxi anticline with an approximately east-west-trending axis. [17]The dominant fault structures are oriented in the northeast direction, with a secondary northwest orientation, forming an overall concave-convex structural pattern (Fig. 4b, Fig. 3).The stratigraphic units exposed in the study area are similar to those exposed in the southern part of the Huaxia Massif (Wang et al., 2013). Except for the Silurian strata, all other stratigraphic units are present in the study area (Fig. 4).
The study reveals the existence of two geothermal systems in the area: hydrothermal and dry hot geothermal resources. In terms of hydrothermal genesis, atmospheric precipitation, surface water, or ambient groundwater infiltrates through fault structures and weathered fractures. During the deep circulation process in the fractured zone, it extracts heat from normal or elevated rock temperatures and manifests at suitable locations through exposure due to uplift or human engineering activities. As for the dry hot genesis mechanism, the combined effect of high thermal conductivity and the presence of radioactive heat-generating elements in the granite body contributes to the formation of high-temperature geothermal resources in the study area. The granite body in the area is up to 3.5 km thick, predominantly composed of highly differentiated I-type granites from the Yanshanian period, especially those derived from remelting of crustal materials from the pre-Cambrian era, which contain high concentrations of heat-generating elements such as Th, U, and K. The radioactive decay of these heat-generating elements provides a significant amount of heat, thereby increasing the surface heat flow. Through comprehensive analysis, it is evident that the Moho surface in the study area is shallow, and the Moho temperature is relatively high, indicating a substantial contribution of mantle heat to the surface heat flow.
The data used in this study was obtained from the Guangdong Nonferrous Metal Geological Bureau and was utilized to create geological and topographic maps of the study area and its surrounding regional geology.