Terrane provenance and amalgamation: examples from the Caledonides

Abstract

The Scottish Caledonides have grown by the accretion of terranes generated somewhere along the Laurentian margin. By the time these terranes had been emplaced along the Scottish sector, they were structurally truncated then reassembled to form an incomplete collage of indirectly related tectonic elements of a destructive margin. The basement to some of these tectonic elements and the basement blocks belonging to the previously accreted Precambrian are of uncertain provenance and a source in the Pan-African craton is possible. As terranes migrate along the orogen they generate in the fault zones and on their periphery a reservoir of mature sediment. This mature sediment is produced because of the recycling produced during the generation and destruction of sedimentary basins developing during terrane translation. At each period of recycling the mature sediments are mixed with less mature sediments yielded from local uplifts generated by the new basin formation. If a large part of the orogen suffers orthogonal closure, giant river systems may form and disperse sediment across terranes. This is likely to have happened during the Devonian-Carboniferous of parts of N. Europe.