Oceanic plateau

Oceanic plateau

Mineralogy, lead isotope and metal geochemistry of gold-rich Tertiary VHMS deposits of the Western Cordillera of Ecuador

Published in Adam Piestrzyński, Mineral Deposits at the Beginning of the 21st Century, 2001

Recent studies on the geotectonic evolution of the Western Cordillera and of the Coastal Plain of Ecuador (Jaillard et al. 1997, Reynaud et al. 1999) point to accretion to the continent of two or more Cretaceous oceanic plateau fragments with overlying intraoceanic island arcs during Paleocene, cessation of arc activity, subduction jumps to the west, and onset of new arcs on top or adjacent to the older ones.

Impacts of Hikurangi Plateau subduction on the origin and evolution of the Alpine Fault

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Journal Information

Published in New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 2018

Martin Reyners

Recent seismological studies of the three-dimensional (3D) crustal structure of the South Island (Eberhart-Phillips and Bannister 2002; Eberhart-Phillips et al. 2008; Reyners et al. 2017a, 2017b) shed light on many of these questions. A major advance has been the identification of the subducted part of the Hikurangi Plateau. This plateau formed as part of the largest oceanic plateau on Earth, the Ontong Java Plateau, c. 122 Ma (Neal et al. 1997). Shortly after the plateau formed (at c. 120 Ma) the Hikurangi and Manihiki plateaux rifted from it, and subsequently the Hikurangi Plateau rifted from the Manihiki Plateau at the Osbourn Trough spreading centre and drifted south. The plateau then suffered two episodes of subduction beneath New Zealand: first, at 105–100 Ma during north–south convergence with the Gondwana margin; and currently, during east–west convergence between the Pacific and Australian plates.

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Mineralogy, lead isotope and metal geochemistry of gold-rich Tertiary VHMS deposits of the Western Cordillera of Ecuador

Impacts of Hikurangi Plateau subduction on the origin and evolution of the Alpine Fault