A regional paleomagnetic study of lithotectonic domains in the Central Gneiss Belt, Grenville Province, Ontario

We have made a regional paleomagnetic study of lithotectonic domains in the Central Gneiss Belt of the Grenville Province in Ontario along ten N-S and E-W traverses up to 200 km in length. Although originally intended to clarify the tectonic mechanism by which these exotic terranes were assembled and welded to the Archean Superior craton during the ∼1150-Ma Grenvillian orogeny, we actually learned much more about the timing of post-orogenic uplift of the various domains around 1000-900 Ma as they stabilized and became part of the Rodinia supercontinent. The normal (N) and reverse (R) natural remanent magnetizations (NRMs) of all domains, as well as those of reactivated regions flanking the Grenville Front (GF, the Superior-Grenville boundary) to the north and south, have paleomagnetic poles falling on the 980-920-Ma (40Ar/39Ar calibrated) portion of the Grenville apparent polar wander track for Laurentia. There is a general tendency for paleopoles to young with increasing distance of domains from the GF, implying that more southerly domains were uplifted and magnetized later, but two of the domains do not fit this pattern. Previously reported younging trends away from the GF, based on K/Ar thermochron maps and paleomagnetic ‘zone poles’, are untrustworthy because of hydrothermal alteration, which causes chemical remagnetization and anomalously old K/Ar ages near the GF. Another trend in our data is a regular increase in the R/N ratio with increasing distance south of the GF. In the reactivated zones flanking the GF, NRMs are overwhelmingly of N polarity, whereas well away from the GF, R/N is close to 50:50. Also, NRM intensities and susceptibility values increase 100-fold away from the GF, peaking ≈10 km south of the front, with a pulse-like pattern similar to that documented in anomalously high 40Ar/39Ar dates in the same region. Both the magnetic and Ar/Ar results are likely due to a ‘wave’ of hydrothermal alteration and remagnetization during which fluids were driven away from the GF. Since the remagnetized NRM near the GF has approximately the same direction as NRMs in domains away from the GF, hydrothermal activity along fault systems south of the GF must have continued until ∼1000 Ma, long after the collisional orogeny itself.