About a peri-Gondwanan-North African enlarged acceptance of the Caledonian Orogeny

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The notion of "Caledonian Orogeny" is restricted by most authors to the Ordovician-Devonian thermotectonic events that are associated with the Laurentia-Baltica-Avalonia suturing. However, some views consider an orogeny as the sum of tectonic, metamorphic, and magmatic events accompanying an entire supercontinent assembly or Wilson cycle. Following this line of thinking, the Caledonian and Variscan orogenies successively assembled Pangea. During the Ordovician Period, rifting, collision, deformation, metamorphism, and magmatism took place within the Gondwana margin. All these events are known today in the basement of the Cadomian terranes from Iberia through the Alps up to the Romanian Carpathians and Balkans. We plead here for the enlargement of the "Caledonian Orogeny" terminology to these events and places, under the name of the "Caledonian North African orogenic event" or "Caledonian North African orogen".

Acta Geologica Polonica

“…The Cenerian event (accretion of "continental" vs. oceanic lithospheres) corresponds somewhat to the well-recognized Ordovician convergence systems, likewise the east Australian Lachlan fold belt, Fammatian, Humberian, Taconic and Grampian orogenies (Balintoni et al 2011a;Zurbriggen 2015Zurbriggen , 2017aStephan et al 2019;Meinhold et al 2011 and references therein). All these Ordovician orogenic systems are characterized by recycled continental crust.…”

“…The "Caledonian North African orogen" (Balintoni et al 2011a) or "Cenerian-" i.e. "Sardic event" apparently contributed to important geodynamic assembly and amalgamation of the peri-Gondwanan lithosphere (Zurbriggen 2015;Text-fig.…”

Early Paleozoic Cenerian (Sardic) geodynamic relationships of peripheral eastern north Gondwana affinities: revisiting the Ordovician of the Getic/Kučaj nappe (eastern Serbia)

“…The in volve ment of a Mid-Or do vi cian compressional event within the wider Carpathian-Bal kan base ment ter ranes was first sug gested by Golonka et al (2005), Haydoutov et al (2010), and Balintoni et al (2011. This Mid-Or do vi cian event was orig inally re ferred to as the "early Cal edo nian orog eny" (Balintoni et al, 2011).…”

“…The in volve ment of a Mid-Or do vi cian compressional event within the wider Carpathian-Bal kan base ment ter ranes was first sug gested by Golonka et al (2005), Haydoutov et al (2010), and Balintoni et al (2011. This Mid-Or do vi cian event was orig inally re ferred to as the "early Cal edo nian orog eny" (Balintoni et al, 2011). The Carpathian-Bal kan base ment ter ranes which were ex posed to Cambro-Or do vi cian ac cre tion or "orog eny" under went tec tonic trans port to be come an ex otic Variscan basement col lage in the af ter math (e.g., ¯elaŸniewicz et al, 2004;Carrigan et al, 2005;Oczlon et al, 2007;Kro ner and Romer, 2013;Zulauf et al, 2014;Antiae et al, 2017;Žák and Sláma, 2017; Fig.…”

“…The Lower Pa leo zoic bi par tite north Gond wana periph ery may be ei ther ge net i cally linked with a Cambro-Or do vician ac tive mar gin (Zurbriggen, 2017a, b) or sim ply with back-arc ex ten sion (Stephan et al, 2019). The Cambro-Or do vician in ter val was, how ever, tec toni cally crit i cal for north Gondwana, char ac ter ized by a com plex in ter play of plate tec tonic pro cesses: Or do vi cian arc-supercontinent col li sions, rift ing, (palaeo)north wards drift of peri-Gondwanan ter ranes, for ma tion of un con formi ties, meta mor phism, (bi modal) ig ne ous ac tiv ity, in clu sive de vel op ment of high-strain de for ma tion (e.g., Murphy et al, 2008;van Staal and Hatcher, 2010;Balintoni et al, 2010Balintoni et al, , 2011Balintoni et al, , 2014Zurbriggen, 2014Zurbriggen, , 2017aCocco and Funneda, 2017;Maino et al, 2019;Stephan et al, 2019;Spahiae et al, 2021;Cocco et al, 2022). In ad di tion to a num ber of over lapping lithospheric-scale pro cesses, the Or do vi cian of north Gond wana is fur ther com pli cated as it com bines (i) as tro nom ically in duced Earth-scale cool ing ep i sodes with the rather lo calized Mid dle and Late Or do vi cian north Gondwanan glaciations (Young, 1989;Fang et al, 2019), (ii) a phase of mas sive ironstone pro duc tion (Guerrak, 1988, Young, 1992Trela, 2008;Pufahl et al, 2020;Dunn et al, 2021, and ref er ences therein), and (iii) the im mense in flow of Pan-Af ri can orogen-de rived clastic ma te rial indicating trans port from a dis tant hin ter land (e.g., Bahlburg et al, 2009;Meinhold et al, 2013;Avigad et al, 2017;Benayad et al, 2019).…”