Electrical structure across a major ice-covered fault belt in northern Victoria Land (East Antarctica)

A Geomagnetic Depth Sounding profile was performed across the glaciated Rennick Graben and the adjacent fault-bounded terranes of northern Victoria Land in East Antarctica. Induction arrows analysis and a 2D inversion model provide a unique deep electrical resistivity window beneath these fault zones. The electrical resistivity break across the Lanterman Fault is apparently restricted to the upper crust, suggesting that this strike-slip fault may not represent a deep lithospheric suture. Further east, a westward-dipping conductor is traced to a depth of 40 km beneath the Robertson Bay Terrane. It may image a remnant of the paleo-Pacific oceanic plate, which subducted beneath the Bowers Terrane. Within the Wilson Terrane, the Rennick Graben is an upper-crust resistive block. The Rennick Graben lacks a deep crustal or upper mantle conductor, in contrast to several continental rifts. However, similar resistive lower crust underlies some other major strike-slip fault belts

Post-Variscan thermal and tectonic evolution of the KTB site and its surroundings.

The post-Carboniferous crustal evolution of the German Continental Deep Drilling Program (KTB) area, as summarized in this paper, could not be predicted from surface observations: deep drilling was essential for its revelation, The most conspicuous and unexpected feature discovered in the drill hole is the absence of marked gradients with respect to the pre-Carboniferous record, There are no depth-related differences in K-Ar cooling ages of hornblende and white mica, in petrology or in lithology, All metamorphic rocks encountered, both at the surface as well as in the drill hole down to 9100 m depth, were below 300 degrees C from the Carboniferous onward. The late to post-Carboniferous deformation is essentially confined to several fault zones, A major fault zone encountered in the drill hole at 7000 m depth is linked by a prominent seismic reflector to the Franconian Lineament, the surface boundary between Variscan basement and Mesozoic cover, This fault zone probably formed in the late Paleozoic and reactivated as a reverse fault in the Mesozoic. Two important episodes of NE-SW directed shortening by movements along reverse faults took place in the early Triassic and in the late Cretaceous, as indicated by the distribution of apatite and titanite fission-track ages, the sericite K-Ar ages of fault rocks, and the sedimentary record in the adjacent basins, Upper crustal slices were detached at a specific level, corresponding to the approximate position of the brittle-ductile transition in post-Variscan times, and form an antiformal stack that was penetrated by the KTB throughout its entire depth range