Tectonometamorphic evolution of the Samaná complex, northern Hispaniola: Implications for the burial and exhumation of high-pressure rocks in a collisional accretionary wedge

Abstract

The Samaná complex exposes a segment of a high-P metasedimentary collisional accretionary wedge, built during Caribbean island arc-North America continental margin convergence. Combined detailed mapping, metamorphic mineral assemblages, multi-equilibrium calculations and thermodynamical modelling of garnet zoning, together with isotopic ages, allow proposing a tectonothermal evolution of the complex involving three major stages (M1 to M3). M1 metamorphism was characterised by a prograde P–T path towards the pressure-peak in the lawsonite-blueschists (Santa Bárbara Schists and Rincón Marbles lower structural nappes) and garnet-blueschists to eclogite-facies conditions (Punta Balandra upper nappe). This high-P metamorphism and related D1 deformation took place from the Eocene to Late Oligocene, when the different nappes were buried along a cold subduction-zone gradient. Contemporary to the D2 deformation, M2 retrograde metamorphism was associated in all nappes with substantial decompression under nearly isothermal or cooling conditions to the epidote-blueschists and greenchists facies conditions. D2 deformation produced ENE-directed folding, thrusting and nappe stacking in the complex, when nappes went sequentially incorporated to a growing collisional accretionary complex between the Late Eocene and the earliest Miocene. D2 deformation is thus responsible for much of the exhumation of the subducted rocks and for the thinning of the nappe pile. As the continuity of the P–T conditions within the accreted metasedimentary material were in this case preserved, the exhumation mechanisms for Samaná complex high-P rocks was most probably driven by underthrusting/underplating and erosion. Non-penetrative fabrics associated with D3 and D4 late deformations indicate M3 cooling in the greenschists and subgreenchists-facies conditions. D5 sinistral strike-slip brittle faults cut and laterally displaced the whole nappe pile of the Samaná complex from the Lower Miocene to the Present.