Early Cambrian crustal shortening and a clockwise P–T–t path from the southern Prince Charles Mountains, East Antarctica: implications for the formation of Gondwana

Cambrian orogenesis (550–490 Ma) in the Lambert Province of the southern Prince Charles Mountains resulted in three successive stages of deformation. The earliest of these deformations resulted in the development of a layer‐parallel foliation (S1) that was folded into macro‐scale recumbent folds (F2). Subsequent deformation buckled the rocks into long‐wavelength (c. 20 km), SW‐ to NW‐trending antiformal closures (F3) mostly separated from each other by west to SW trending, steeply dipping, high‐strain zones. Metapelitic rocks from the region are divisible into two compositional types: a high‐Al, ‐Fe and ‐K type and a high‐Mg, ‐Ca and ‐Na type. In rocks of both composition, relic staurolite preceded the formation of upper amphibolite facies garnet + biotite + sillimanite ± muscovite mineral assemblages that record peak pressures and temperatures of c. 650–700 °C and 6–7 kbar. Subsequent decompression of c. 3 kbar is implied from texturally late plagioclase and a reduction in the modal abundance of garnet in the high‐Al, ‐Fe and ‐K metapelites, and from texturally late cordierite in the more magnesium rocks. This clockwise P–T–t path, with prograde heating followed by rapid decompression, is: (i) equivalent to that recorded in the same‐aged rocks at Prydz Bay located 600 km to the north, and (ii) similar to the modelled response of the crust to thickening following continent–continent collision. These results indicate that large areas of East Antarctica were thickened and rapidly exhumed, probably in response to collisional orogenesis during the Early Cambrian. This supports the inference that Early Cambrian orogenesis in the Prydz Bay–Prince Charles Mountains region of East Antarctica marks one of the fundamental lithospheric boundaries within Gondwana.