Cenozoic transtension along the Transantarctic Mountains‐West Antarctic rift boundary, southern Victoria Land, Antarctica

Abstract

Brittle fault arrays mapped along the structural boundary between the Transantarctic Mountains and the West Antarctic rift system are oriented obliquely to the axis of the mountains and offshore rift basins. The north to northwest trending regional rift boundary is thus not controlled by continuous rift border faults. Instead, the rift margin trend must be imposed by inherited lithospheric weaknesses along the ancestral East Antarctic craton margin. Fault kinematic solutions indicate that a dextral transtensional regime characterized the rift boundary in the Cenozoic and that dominantly transcurrent motion occurred during the most recent faulting episode. The Transantarctic Mountains are considered to be a rift‐flank uplift, yet no substantial isostatic uplift is expected in a transtensional setting, and the mechanism of large‐magnitude Cenozoic uplift of the mountains remains problematical. Regional deformation patterns in Victoria Land and the Ross Sea can be explained by a transtensional model and are not compatible with large‐magnitude crustal stretching within the West Antarctic rift system in the Cenozoic. The crustal thinning across the rift system more likely took place in the Mesozoic, when major West Antarctic crustal block motions occurred. The Cenozoic intracontinental deformation can be related to plate interaction resulting from the global Eocene plate reorganization, prior to the final separation between Antarctica and a narrow salient of the southeastern Australian margin. Displacement magnitude was probably minor, and thus early Tertiary east–west Antarctic motion is unlikely to account for discrepancies in global plate motion circuits.