Abstract
The Ordovician Turquoise Bluff Slate in northeastern Tasmania is a 2 km-thick sequence of deep-marine siliceous black slates. It is dominated by meta-siltstones with bimodal grainsize distributions typical of turbidite TE-1 and TE-2 facies. The slates have high SiO2 indicating they are hemipelagites. The high Ba and V indicate they were deposited in an anoxic environment associated with high oceanic productivity. All these features are common in muddy turbidites. U–Th–Pb dating of detrital monazite and authigenic xenotime in the slates supports previous evidence that the dominant cleavage, in this unit, formed during the Benambran Orogeny. The whole-rock composition of the slates is similar to black slates in the Adaminaby Group, NSW. A review of Paleozoic whole-rock compositions from the Lachlan Orogen confirms they all have trace element contents similar to average Australian shale. However, there are subtle differences in composition. The Turquoise Bluff Slate and other Mathinna Supergroup rocks from the Eastern Tasmania Terrane have higher average Cr content than similar age turbidites from Victoria and NSW. This probably reflects a small contribution from Tasmania Cambrian ultramafic rocks in the provenance. If this were correct, northeastern Tasmania was closer to western Tasmania in the Paleozoic than other provinces of the Lachlan Orogen, southeastern Australia. Other subtle features of the whole-rock composition of Paleozoic sedimentary rocks from the Lachlan Orogen indicate it may be possible to recognise provincial variations in composition that will provide new constraints on tectonic models of southeastern Australia.
Acknowledgements
We thank Terry Mernagh and David Champion for help with background information on the analyses sourced from the OZchem database, and Michael Bruce and Robin Offler for their constructive reviews, which improved the paper. This paper is published with the permission of the Director of Mines, Tasmania.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplementary papers
Table S1. Whole-rock XRF results, methods and sample locations. Table S2. LA-ICP-MS methods and results. Table S3. EPMA xenotime analyses. Table S4. Detrital mineral abundance.