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ABSTRACT
Seafloor fabric indicators are the main features used for dating global-scale plate reorganizations. However, the lack of oceanic crusts older than 200 Ma limits their application only to the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. Furthermore, in cases such as the mid-Cretaceous time when reversals in Earth’s magnetic field did not occur, the plate reorganization ages obtained from seafloor fabric indicators are imprecise. I propose the record of continental deformation as an alternative approach for dating these events. A compilation of cooling/deformation, migmatization, and unconformity ages recorded around the globe collectively indicates that continental deformation associated with the mid-Cretaceous plate reorganization culminated at 107 Ma. This age strongly correlates with ages obtained from other data such as palaeomagnetic poles. Considering that the deformational features similar to which are compiled in this study appear to be temporally correlated with other reorganization events, the record of globally distributed continental deformation might be used for other reorganization events whose timing is poorly constrained.
Acknowledgements
I thank Craig Jones for a thorough and critical review of the first and substantially different version of this manuscript and Mathieu Rodriguez, Jolante van Wijk, Peter DeCelles, and Philippe Agard for their comments and suggestions on the earlier drafts. Thanks are extended to Robert Stern for editorial handling and two anonymous reviewers for insightful and constructive comments, which significantly improved the quality of the final draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00206814.2024.2330099