METAMORPHIC CONDITIONS IN OROGENIC BELTS: A RECORD OF SECULAR CHANGE

Abstract

In general, Archean rocks exhibit rather ordinary moderate-P-high-T facies series metamorphism; neither blueschists nor any record of deep continental subduction and return are documented. However, the abundance and scale of ultrahigh-temperature (UHT) metamorphic belts from the Neoarchean to the Cambrian imply a significant change in geodynamics during the Neoarchean Era, after which transient sites of high heat flow were available at intervals throughout this period of Earth evolution. Many Neoproterozoic-Cambrian UHT metamorphic belts appear to have developed in settings analogous to modern backarcs that were closed and inverted during crustal aggregation and formation of the Gondwana supercontinent. If backarcs were the general setting for UHT metamorphism, then on a hotter Earth the cyclic formation of supercratons (in the Neoarchean Era) and supercontinents (in the Proterozoic Eon) required the destruction of oceans floored by thinner lithosphere that may have generated hotter backarcs than those associated with the current destruction of the Pacific Ocean on the modern Earth. The inherent weakness of the lithosphere in a hotter thermal regime inevitably localized magmatism and deformation at these sites contemporaneously with UHT metamorphism. Medium-temperature eclogites of crustal derivation and associated highpressure granulites are also first recognized in the Neoarchean, for example within the Belomorian Mobile Belt, and they occur at intervals throughout the Proterozoic, for example in the Orosirian Usagaran Orogen and in the Grenvillian belts of the Proto-Atlantic region, and Paleozoic, for example in the circum-North Atlantic Caledonides and European Variscides. Eclogite-high-pressure granulite (E-HPG) metamorphism is predominantly a Proterozoic-Paleozoic phenomenon—complementary to but sparser than UHT metamorphism to begin with, but extending further into the Paleozoic than does UHT metamorphism—that is inferred to record subduction-to-collision orogenesis.