Ancient Antarctica: the Archaean of the east Antarctic shield

摘要: Publisher SummaryThis chapter describes the various aspects of the East Antarctic shield. The East Antarctic Shield comprises most of the main landmass of Antarctica, bounded by the Transantarctic Mountains and the Southern Ocean in the sector from Africa to east Australia. Despite less than 0.5% of its land area consisting of exposed rock, the East Antarctic Shield preserves a remarkable record of Earth evolution that spans in time from the earliest Archaean to the Cambrian. Temporal, structural, and metamorphic constraints from the best-studied Pan-African areas are consistent with their formation and evolution as collisional belts, with collision terminated either by late-stage extensional collapse or the lateral escape of mid-crustal domains along high-strain zones at ca. 520–500 Ma. The correlations in events and provenance ages in the metasediments have stimulated the proposal that the Mawson Block may …