Abstract

The Darling River of eastern Australia flows along a relatively straight course for much of a ∼2000 km linear feature extending from South Australia to the offshore continental margin of Queensland. This crustal-scale feature, the Darling River Lineament (DRL), is considered to have originally been a part of the Tasman Line, a major Late Proterozoic fracture zone which was active during the breakup of the Rodinia supercontinent. Even though extensive Phanerozoic orogenic contraction has since affected the Darling River region, the present surface expression of the DRL indicates relatively recent reactivation. Time–temperature modelling of apatite fission track data from rocks straddling the southwestern portion of the DRL suggests that Phanerozoic cooling along this part of the lineament principally occurred during three major episodes. Each of these can be tentatively linked to tectonism at the time; Late Silurian to Middle Devonian (∼420–380 Ma) deformation during either the Lachlan Orogeny or the Alice Springs Orogeny, Late Permian to Early Triassic (∼260–240 Ma) deformation during the Hunter–Bowen Orogeny and Early to middle Tertiary (∼60–40 Ma) deformation in response to Pacific Plate rearrangement and north Australian collision in Papua New Guinea. Moreover, the results reveal that the magnitude of cooling differed significantly across the lineament during each episode, indicating that this major Late Proterozoic feature has been reactivated several times during the Phanerozoic.

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