AbstractWe chose the Jatobá Basin (JB) in the Borborema Province in northeastern Brazil to address two outstanding problems, basin tectonic inversion and stress propagation, because (a) evidence of tectonic inversion is conspicuous in the JB, and (b) the basin sits on intracontinental northeastern Brazil, far from plate boundaries and the most obvious stress sources. We found robust evidence of oblique reverse faulting inside the basin, putting sediments of the JB's depocenter hundreds of meters above the hard granitic host basement. We also found sound evidence of hydrographic flow reversal, that is, earlier basement‐to‐basin runoff, followed by basin‐to‐basement runoff. This change means that formerly the basement stood higher than the basin, and later the basin was uplifted (inverted) to currently stand hundreds of meters higher than the basement, especially where the gravity anomaly map shows the deepest depocenter. Coarse conglomerates, sourced in the uplifted basin and blanketing the adjacent basement for kilometers, are only cut by the current hydrographic network. From these main lines of evidence, we infer recent basin tectonic inversion (Quaternary, i.e., <2.6 Ma?). The WSW‐ENE orientation of the maximum compressive stress needed to invert the basin likely results from Mid‐Atlantic and Andean pushes. We conclude that lithospheric plates can deform in their cores because of stresses propagating from plate boundaries to distant plate interiors, where the lithosphere has been locally weakened and strain has concentrated.
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