Abstract
Most of the Caribbean plate, which currently lies between the American continents, represents a mantle plume-derived 8–20 km thick Cretaceous oceanic plateau that was formed in the Pacific region and moved eastwards. The northern islands of the Caribbean are largely made up of a dismembered island arc that was located along the western entrance to the inter-American region (termed the Great Arc of the Caribbean) in the mid-late Cretaceous. Importantly, the timing of Caribbean lithospheric movement into the inter-American region is controversial, with one hypothesis advocating that it happened in the Hauterivian-Albian (132.9–100.5 Ma), and a second hypothesis proposing the Turonian-Campanian (93.9–72.1 Ma). In order to investigate this problem, island arc rocks are studied on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, which are Barremian (127 Ma) to Santonian (83.6 Ma) in age. Immobile trace element and NdHf radiogenic isotope ratios demonstrate that the arc rocks are derived from the partial melting of an Atlantic MORB-like mantle source region that has been variably contaminated with slab-derived fluids composed of continental detritus and slow sediment clay components. We argue that the lack of a mantle plume geochemical signature in the rocks supports the idea that the movement of Caribbean lithosphere into the inter-American region occurred in the late Cretaceous (post-Santonian) due to a subduction polarity reversal caused by collision of the Caribbean oceanic plateau with the Great Arc of the Caribbean.
Highlights
The Caribbean plate is situated between the much larger North and South American plates and its eastern and western margins are separated from oceanic crust in the Atlantic and Pacific by active subduction zones
After the Cretaceous oceanic plateau (COP) was emplaced onto Farallon oceanic crust it was transported to the northeast and both the plateau and Great Arc moved into the inter-American region and developed into a separate plate (e.g., Boschman et al, 2014; Burke, 1988; Pindell et al, 2011)
We have shown that the composition of the Water Island Formation (WIF) silicic rocks can be generated by partial melting of a relatively shallow metabasic source region with compositions similar to the WIF mafic rocks, geochemical modelling can support a fractional crystallisation model for generating the keratophyres
Summary
The Caribbean plate is situated between the much larger North and South American plates and its eastern and western margins are separated from oceanic crust in the Atlantic and Pacific by active subduction zones. A large island arc was located along the western entrance to the inter-American region (termed the Great Arc of the Caribbean) (Burke, 1988). After the COP was emplaced onto Farallon oceanic crust it was transported to the northeast and both the plateau and Great Arc moved into the inter-American region and developed into a separate plate (the Caribbean plate) (e.g., Boschman et al, 2014; Burke, 1988; Pindell et al, 2011). Additional arc fragments are represented by the submarine Aves Ridge (west of the Lesser Antilles) and the southern islands of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire and parts of Trinidad and Tobago (Escuder Viruete et al, 2008; Kerr et al, 1999; Neill et al, 2011, 2014; Pindell et al, 2011; Wright and Wyld, 2011)
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