Gondwana´s Apparent Polar Wander Path during the Permian-new insights from South America

RAPALINI, AUGUSTO; ARZADÚN GUADALUPE; TICKYJ, HUGO; TOMEZZOLI, RENATA NELA; CRISTALLINI, E.O.; GALLO, LEANDRO C.; CHEMALE, FARID JUNIOR

NATURE

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2018 vol. 8 p. 1 - 7

0028-0836

A long-standing debate regarding the configuration of Pangea during the Late Paleozoic has taken place in the paleomagnetic community since the proposal of Pangea B. The large tectonic implication that this paleogeographic model causes for the evolution of Pangea with the need of a Permian and/or Triassic megashear between Laurasia, have led to a wide range of hypotheses or explanations. Among others, geomagnetic anomalies or systematic bias in the recording of the paleofield have been proposed, in order to avoid such major intra-Pangea movements and to accommodate the paleomagnetic database within a Pangea A (Wegener´s type) reconstruction. We present paleomagnetic results from Permian volcanic rocks of the Cerro El Centinela, Central Argentina. Undeformed volcanic rocks are not supposed to be affected by any inclination bias and are, therefore, ideal to test different paleogeographic models. The presence of two paleopole positions in the same stratigraphically continuous volcanic sequence, makes this location optimal to constrain the track of the apparent polar wander path of Gondwana during the Late Paleozoic, which clearly shows the transition from a Pangea B during the Carboniferous-Permian, to a Pangea A in the Permian ? Triassic boundary.