Archaean zircons in Miocene oceanic hotspot rocks establish ancient continental 
crust beneath Mauritius

Ashwal, Lewis D.; Wiedenbeck, Michael; Torsvik, Trond; GFZ SIMS Publications, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum

doi:10.1038/ncomms14086

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Archaean zircons in Miocene oceanic hotspot rocks establish ancient continental crust beneath Mauritius

Authors

Ashwal, Lewis D.
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/michawi

Wiedenbeck, Michael
3.1 Inorganic and Isotope Geochemistry, 3.0 Geochemistry, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

/persons/resource/trondht

Torsvik, Trond
2.5 Geodynamic Modelling, 2.0 Geophysics, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

External Ressource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (public)

2121899.pdf
(Publisher version), 3MB

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Ashwal, L. D., Wiedenbeck, M., Torsvik, T. (2017): Archaean zircons in Miocene oceanic hotspot rocks establish ancient continental crust beneath Mauritius. - Nature Communications, 8, 14086.
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14086

Cite as: https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_2121899

Abstract

A fragment of continental crust has been postulated to underlie the young plume-related lavas of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius based on the recovery of Proterozoic zircons from basaltic beach sands. Here we document the first U–Pb zircon ages recovered directly from 5.7 Ma Mauritian trachytic rocks. We identified concordant Archaean xenocrystic zircons ranging in age between 2.5 and 3.0 Ga within a trachyte plug that crosscuts Older Series plume-related basalts of Mauritius. Our results demonstrate the existence of ancient continental crust beneath Mauritius; based on the entire spectrum of U–Pb ages for old Mauritian zircons, we demonstrate that this ancient crust is of central-east Madagascar affinity, which is presently located ∼700 km west of Mauritius. This makes possible a detailed reconstruction of Mauritius and other Mauritian continental fragments, which once formed part of the ancient nucleus of Madagascar and southern India.