Focusing of relative plate motion at a continental transform fault: Cenozoic dextral displacement >700 km on New Zealand's Alpine Fault, reversing >225 km of Late Cretaceous sinistral motion

Abstract

AbstractThe widely accepted ∼450 km Cenozoic dextral strike‐slip displacement on New Zealand's Alpine Fault is large for continental strike‐slip faults, but it is still less than 60% of the Cenozoic relative plate motion between the Australian and Pacific plates through Zealandia, with the remaining motion assumed to be taken up by rotation and displacement on other faults in a zone up to 300 km wide. We show here that the 450 km total displacement across the Alpine Fault is an artifact of assumptions about the geometry of New Zealand's basement terranes in the Eocene, and the actual Cenozoic dextral displacement across the active trace is greater than 665 km, with more than 700 km (and <785 km since 25 Ma) occurring in a narrow zone less than 10 km wide. This way, the Alpine Fault has accommodated almost all (>94%) of the relative plate motion in the last 25 Ma at an average rate in excess of 28 mm/yr. It reverses more than 225 km (and <300 km) of sinistral shear through Zealandia in the Late Cretaceous, when Zealandia lay on the margin of Gondwana, providing a direct constraint on the kinematics of extension between East and West Antarctica at this time.