The Tennant Creek porphyry revisited: A synsedimentary sill with peperite margins, Early Proterozoic, Northern Territory

Abstract

Isolated outcrops of coarse‐ and medium‐grained, quartz‐feldspar porphyry occur for some 60 km from Nobles Nob to near Warrego in the Early Proterozoic Tennant Creek Block of the central Northern Territory. The outcrops appear to be part of an approximately conformable sheet of variable thickness (several tens to a few hundred metres), enclosed by sedimentary rocks of the Warramunga Group. The porphyry is characterized by euhedral, complete, evenly distributed crystals up to 2 cm across, in a microcrystalline groundmass. In some samples the groundmass shows relict perlitic cracks and was formerly coherent glass. In detail, upper and lower contacts of the porphyry sheet are highly irregular: porphyry contains wisps, blocks and large rafts of sandstone, and sandstone encloses single euhedral crystals and blebs, tongues and lobes of porphyry. Clasts of each rock type commonly have fluidal shapes. Sedimentary rocks at both the upper and the lower contacts are indurated and silicified. Close to the contacts, b...