Assembly, configuration, and break-up history of Rodinia: A synthesis
Introduction
Valentine and Moores (1970) were probably the first to recognise that a supercontinent, comprising just about all continents on Earth, existed towards the end of the Precambrian. They suggested that the break-up of the supercontinent, which they called Pangaea I, by the Cambrian led to a divergence of environments and characteristics amongst the daughter continents, and a sudden prominence of shallow, nutrient-rich shelves and coastal areas, all factors conducive to the diversification of life forms on Earth. This late-Precambrian supercontinent was later renamed Rodinia (McMenamin and McMenamin, 1990) from the Russian word ‘rodit’ meaning ‘to beget’ or ‘to give birth’. McMenamin and McMenamin (1990) considered Rodinia to have been the supercontinent that spawned all subsequent continents, while “the edges (continental shelves) of Rodinia were the cradle of the earliest animals” (McMenamin and McMenamin, 1990, p. 95).
The concept of the supercontinent Rodinia attracted much attention in 1991, when three researchers (Moores, 1991, Dalziel, 1991, Hoffman, 1991) published geological evidence for the assembly and break-up of Rodinia, with some of its daughter continents forming Gondwanaland. Common to their propositions is the connection between western Laurentia, Australia and East Antarctica (commonly known as the southwest U.S.–East Antarctic, or SWEAT, connection; Moores, 1991), which follows an earlier suggestion by Bell and Jefferson (1987) based on stratigraphic correlations and palaeomagnetic constraints across the Pacific, and by Eisbacher (1985) based on stratigraphic correlation alone.
An explosion of new data and ideas occurred in the following years, and, in order to better coordinate the global efforts in testing the Rodinia hypothesis, a UNESCO-IGCP project (No. 440, 1999–2004) was established to investigate the formation, configuration, and break-up of Rodinia, and to construct an interpretative Geodynamic Map of the Rodinia supercontinent (the Rodinia Map hereafter; Appendix I, see hard copy in the print version of this volume; also available online). Although few still doubt the existence of a late Precambrian supercontinent, there is still no consensus regarding the number of participating cratons, their relative configuration within the supercontinent and the chronology and mode of assembly and break-up of the supercontinent. In this paper we provide an overview of evidence for and against major Rodinian reconstructions, including those in the Rodinia Map (Appendix I). We discuss some current ideas regarding the formation of Rodinia and processes that led to its break-up, and present an animation for the evolution of Rodinia from 1100 Ma till the formation of Gondwanaland at 530 Ma (Appendix II, available online).
The challenges to reconstructing the history of Rodinia include inadequate high-quality geological, geochronological and palaeomagnetic data, multiple possible interpretations for each data set, and uncertainties in fundamental assumptions such as the application of modern-style plate tectonics to late-Precambrian time and that the geomagnetic field was a geocentric axial dipole field (an assumption that underlines interpretations of palaeomagnetic data). In this paper we assume that modern-style plate tectonics, with the possible complication of true polar wander (TPW), apply to late Precambrian (e.g., Stern, 2005), and that the geomagnetic field was dominantly a geocentric axial dipole field at that time (Evans, 2006). We emphasise the importance of considering multiple lines of evidence in testing any reconstruction, because only through such an approach can the potentially large number of solutions be reduced to the most likely scenarios (Fig. 1a). We strive to be as objective as possible when discussing alternative interpretations, at the same time trying to make a self-consistent synthesis. We emphasise that not every opinion expressed in this paper is agreed on by all co-authors.
Section snippets
Major inter-continental connections proposed for Rodinia using multidisciplinary evidence
Because Laurentia is flanked by Neoproterozoic passive margins, it is commonly regarded as being at the centre of Rodinia assembly and break-up (e.g., Hoffman, 1991). We will evaluate the various continental connections around the margin of Laurentia proposed for Rodinia time.
Synthesis and animation: assembly and break-up of Rodinia, and formation of Gondwanaland
Through a series of cartoons, we illustrate a feasible scenario for the formation of Rodinia as shown in Fig. 8 and Appendix I, its break-up, and the eventual formation of Gondwanaland by the Early Cambrian. The rotation parameters for the major continental blocks are given in Appendix III, available online. A digital animation of the palaeogeographic evolution between 1100 Ma and 530 Ma, with geological features shown for selected time windows, is also given (Appendix II). We recognise that this
Concluding remarks
The late Mesoproterozoic and Neoproterozoic period is one of the most remarkable time intervals in Earth's history. During this time we see the assembly and break-up of the supercontinent Rodinia that was ancestral to the long-lived supercontinent of Gondwanaland, possible global superplume events and rapid true polar wander event(s), repeated low-latitude glaciations, and finally the explosion of multicellular life (McMenamin and McMenamin, 1990) and the emergence of a plate dynamic and
Acknowledgments
Not all co-authors agree on everything written in this paper, and the map of Rodinia presented in this paper reflects only one of the plausible models. We are grateful for support from UNESCO/IUGS/IGCP and their national committees, the Australian Research Council (through the Tectonics Special Research Centre and Discovery Project grant DP0450020), the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Swedish Research Council. This work would not have been possible without the inspiration
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