Africa's Drift Inferred From Apparent Pole Wandering From the Jurassic to Present

The drift history of Adria and Africa from 280 Ma to Present, Jurassic true polar wander, and zonal climate control on Tethyan sedimentary facies

Authors:

1. G. Muttoni (a, b)
2. E. Dallanave (c)
3. J.E.T. Channell (d)

Affiliations:

a. Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra "A. Desio", Università degli Studi di Milano, via Mangiagalli 34, 20133 Milano, Italy

b. ALP - Alpine Laboratory of Paleomagnetism, via Madonna dei Boschi 76, I-12016 Peveragno (CN), Italy

c. Department of Earth and Environmental Science, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich D-80333, Germany

d. Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA

Abstract:

The orogenic belts surrounding the undeformed Adriatic Sea represent the margins of an area known as Adria, the African promontory. We have undertaken a critical appraisal of paleomagnetic data from regions of Adria considered parautochthonous relative to Africa and obtained either from biostratigraphically dated sedimentary rocks, corrected for inclination shallowing, or from igneous rocks that are regarded as free from any inclination shallowing bias. Paleomagnetic directions were used to calculate paleomagnetic poles for comparison with coeval, and inclination flattening-free, paleomagnetic poles from stable Africa. Visual coherence of paleopoles for several time slices from the Early Permian to the Eocene supports the construction of a composite apparent polar wander path (APWP) valid for parautochthonous Adria and stable Africa. This composite APWP is compared to previous APWPs, finding good agreement with the global APWP of Kent and Irving (2010). Both APWPs show a remarkable and rapid polar shift of ~ 40° in the Jurassic that other APWPs tend to underestimate. We interpret this shift to represent a major episode of true polar wander (TPW), from ~ 183 Ma in the Early Jurassic to ~ 151 Ma in the Late Jurassic. Using a simple zonal climate model, the drift motion of Adria attached to Africa appears to be consistent with the distribution of Permian–Cretaceous sedimentary facies on Adria.