Search results for "Continent"
showing 10 items of 598 documents
Crust Formation and Plate Motion in the Early Archean
1992
Mounting evidence for voluminous continental crust formation in the early Archean involving intracrustal melting and selective preservation of granitoid rocks suggests that initial crust formation crust formation and growth were predominantly by magmatic underplating in plumegenerated Iceland-type settings. Collision of these early islands to give rise to larger blocks is suggested by extensive horizontal shortening in both supracrustal and granitoid assemblages. Preservation of early Archean high-grade gneisses that were once at depths of 20 to 30 kilometers implies that these blocks developed thick, subcrustal roots despite high mantle heat flow. Rigid continental plates must have existed…
A new concept of continental construction in the Central Asian Orogenic Belt
2011
A new concept of continental construction based on four main terms: (1) crustal growth, (2) crustal formation, (3) continental growth and (4) continental formation is presented here. Each of these terms reflects a certain process responsible for the formation of what we call now "continental crust". This concept is applied to the Central Asian Orogenic Belt (CAOB), which is a global major accretionary orogen formed after the closure of the Paleo-Asian Ocean, and to its actualistic analogues - orogenic belts and accretionary complexes of the Western Pacific. The main focuses of the paper are the state of activities in the study of the CAOB, the theoretical basics of the new concept of contin…
Petrology, geochronology, and tectonic implications of c . 500 Ma metamorphic and igneous rocks along the northern margin of the Central Asian Orogen…
2008
A significant portion of the continental crust of northern Eurasia is thought to have formed during the evolution of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt at the time of accretion of continental terranes and island arcs. Records of this event are well preserved within the Siberian craton–Central Asian Orogenic Belt transition zone in Lake Baikal region, particularly in the Olkhon terrane. Our results establish granulite-facies conditions for peak metamorphism in the Olkhon terrane, and indicate that the granulites were derived from island arc mafic volcanic rocks and back-arc basin sediments. Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe dating of metamorphic zircons from two mafic granulites yielded …
Zircon ages of late Palaeoproterozoic (ca. 1.72–1.70Ga) extension-related granitoids in NE Rajasthan, India: Regional and tectonic significance
2011
Abstract The Khetri region forms a late Palaeoproterozoic igneous–metamorphic complex in NE Rajasthan, India. Seven granitoid plutons of the Khetri complex have been studied for zircon U–Pb and Pb–Pb dating along with whole-rock and Nd–Sr isotope geochemistry to provide new constraints on the Palaeoproterozoic magmatic activity in the Aravalli orogen of northwestern India. Most intrusives show evidence of moderate to extreme albitisation forming microcline–albite granite and albite granite, respectively. The rocks are metaluminous to weakly peraluminous, largely ferroan and intraplate A-type granites. The U–Pb zircon ages for four plutons cover a time span of 1732–1682 Ma, whereas Pb–Pb zir…
Analysis of the linkages between rainfall and land surface conditions in the West African monsoon through CMAP, ERS-WSC, and NOAA-AVHRR data
2005
International audience; The European Remote Sensing Wind Scatterometer (ERS-WSC) backscattering coefficient, NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (NOAA-AVHRR) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Climate Prediction Center Merged Analysis Precipitation ( CMAP) precipitation data sets are studied over the period August 1991 to December 2000 to document ( 1) the interannual and intra-annual evolutions of vegetation photosynthetic activity and soil-vegetation water content over West Africa and ( 2) their two-way links with precipitation. Over the Sahel, at interannual timescales the strongest relationships between vegetation, soil moisture, and precipitation are observed …
Ecohydrology in Mediterranean areas: a numerical model to describe growing seasons out of phase with precipitations
2008
The probabilistic description of soil moisture dynamics is a relatively new topic in hydrology. The most common ecohydrological models start from a stochastic differential equation describing the soil water balance, where the unknown quantity, the soil moisture, depends both on spaces and time. Most of the solutions existing in literature are obtained in a probabilistic framework and under steady-state condition; even if this last condition allows the analytical handling of the problem, it has considerably simplified the same problem by subtracting generalities from it. <br><br> The steady-state hypothesis, appears perfectly applicable in arid and semiarid climatic areas like th…
Influence of15N enrichment on the net isotopic fractionation factor during the reduction of nitrate to nitrous oxide in soil
2007
5 pages; International audience; Nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, is mainly emitted from soils during the denitrification process. Nitrogen stable-isotope investigations can help to characterise the N(2)O source and N(2)O production mechanisms. The stable-isotope approach is increasingly used with (15)N natural abundance or relatively low (15)N enrichment levels and requires a good knowledge of the isotopic fractionation effect inherent to this biological mechanism. This paper reports the measurement of the net and instantaneous isotopic fractionation factor (alpha(s/p) (i)) during the denitrification of NO(3) (-) to N(2)O over a range of (15)N substrate enrichments (0.37 to 1.00 atom% (15)…
Significance of the Tambien Group (Tigrai, N. Ethiopia) for Snowball Earth events in the Arabian–Nubian Shield
2003
Abstract Juvenile continental crust of the Arabian–Nubian Shield (ANS) formed within a Neoproterozoic supercontinent cycle. Subsequent late Neoproterozoic deposition overlapped a series of dramatic climatic events that are unparalleled in subsequent Phanerozoic time, as proposed by the “Snowball Earth” hypothesis. In particular, extreme negative δ 13 C excursions coincident with glacial diamictite and cap carbonate sequences imply that profound carbon flux changes accompanied widespread glacial transitions (Snowball Events). Such a succession appears to be partially preserved in metasediments of the diamictite-bearing Tambien Group of northern Ethiopia (Negash syncline). Here, a pronounced …
Insights into the compositional evolution of crustal magmatic systems from coupled petrological-geodynamical models
2020
Funding was provided by the VAMOS Research Center, University of Mainz (Germany) and by the ERC Consolidator Grant MAGMA (project #771143). The evolution of crustal magmatic systems is incompletely understood, as most studies are limited either by their temporal or spatial resolution. Exposed plutonic rocks represent the final stage of a long-term evolution punctuated by several magmatic events with different chemistry and generated under different mechanical conditions. Although the final state can be easily described, the nature of each magmatic pulse is more difficult to retrieve. This study presents a new method to investigate the compositional evolution of plutonic systems while consid…