Paleomagnetism and potassium-argon age of the Messejana dike (Portugal and Spain): angular limitation to the rotation of the Iberian Peninsula since the Middle Jurassic

A paleomagnetic and potassium-argon dating investigation has been carried out on a 530-km-long dike system which transects the western Iberian Peninsula in a northeasterly direction. The K-Ar age determinations were made on mineral separates exclusively. They range between 160 and 200 Ma and the authors suppose that this reflects the actual time interval of the intrusion, in accord with previous results. The paleomagnetic pole derived from 12 sites regularly distributed along the dike (71°N, 236°E) coincides well with other Mesozoic paleomagnetic poles from the western Africa. A contemporaneous pole from stable Europe is tentatively deduced from African and North American Late Triassic/Early Jurassic poles using different reconstruction models around the North Atlantic Ocean. The divergence between this pole and the Iberian pole corresponds to the result obtained for Permian poles.