Abstract
The island of New Caledonia is the second largest rock exposure of the continent Zealandia. The New Caledonian basement rocks have been interpreted as representing a late Paleozoic to Mesozoic intra-oceanic arc system that was possibly correlative to contemporaneous terranes in eastern Australia and New Zealand. In order to understand tectonic relationships between the basement rocks of New Caledonia and other eastern Gondwanan terranes, we obtained >2200 new U-Pb ages of detrital zircon grains from New Caledonia. Our new results, combined with a synthesis of previously published geochronological data, show abundant pre-Mesozoic zircon ages, but an absence of Early Permian to Middle Triassic ages characteristic of eastern Gondwana magmatism. The results thus suggest that the detritus of the New Caledonian basement was derived from a local Paleozoic continental fragment that was rifted from the margin of Gondwana, most likely in the Early Permian. The results imply that dispersal of the Gondwanan margins started earlier than the Late Cretaceous opening of the Tasman and Coral seas, consistent with the Mesozoic endemism of both New Caledonia and New Zealand.
Published Version
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