Estrutura do manto superior sob a Província Borborema através de tomografia telessísmica de onda P: implicações para o soerguimento, vulcanismo intraplaca e abertura do atlântico equatorial

Abstract

The Borborema Province is a geological and structural domain located in the Brazilian Northeast, which is limited to the South by the São Francisco craton, to the West by the Parna´ıba basin, and to the North and East by a number of marginal basins. Its basement consists of Paleoproterozoic rocks and Archean nuclei underlaying metamorphic supracrustal rocks with ages that span the entire Proterozoic eon. Its structuration occurred during the Brasiliano/Pan African orogeny, at the end of the Neoproterozoic, resulting in a complex orogenic system affected by ductile, metamorphic, and magmatic deformational processes. During the Mesozoic, the evolution of the Borborema Province was marked by extensional events that eventually led to continental breakup and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. The separation formed a rift system in the Brazilian Northeast that was ultimately responsible for the formation of the marginal and interior basins that pervade the Province. After continental breakup, the evolution of the Province was characterized by episodes of intraplate volcanism along the Macau Queimadas Alignment (MQA) and tectonic uplift in the Borborema Plateau, which displays an elliptic topography and is located in the western half of the Borborema Province with maximum elevations of approximately 1200 m. In order to understand the origin of the intraplate volcanism and uplift after the opening of the Atlantic Ocean, P-wave (and PKPdf) relative residuals from teleseismic earthquakes were utilized to develop tomographic images of the upper mantle under the Borborema Province. About 120 events with magnitudes 5.5 and above, totaling over 1900 relative residuals, were mapped in three dimensions as P-wave velocity perturbations in the upper mantle under the recording seismic stations, through tomographic inversion. Among the main features displayed by the tomographic images are: (i) a relatively shallow low-velocity anomaly (< 150 km), located under the northeastern most corner of the continent and close to the Cenozoic volcanism, and (ii) a high-velocity lithospheric mantle (< 250 km) South of the Patos Lineament – approximately coinciding with the Southern half of the Borborema Plateau – when compared with the lithospheric mantle to the North. These results suggest that the origin of the Cenozoic volcanism might be related to a relatively shallow thermal anomaly at the corner of the continent, and that the Patos Lineament is a lithospheric-scale suture zone that separates contrasting mantle rheologies. The more rigid rheolgy to the South of the Patos Lineament is consistent with an independent tectonic model that explains the topographic elevation of the Borborema Plateau. The images also reveals a low-velocity channel bordering the Borborema Plateau at asthenospheric (250- 400 km) depths. The lithospheric velocity contrast is interpreted as arising from a colder, stronger lithosphere south of the lineament, while the asthenospheric low-velocity channel is interpreted as resulting from lateral flow from a distant mantle plume (located in SE Brazil). The rigid lithosphere South of the Patos Lineament might have also affected the stress regime during the opening of the Equatorial Atlantic. The equatorial region marked the last phase of continental breakup, and displayed a stress regime that contrasted with that in other segments of the Atlantic rift. A cold and rigid lithosphere at the Earth’s equator was independently postulated by other authors to explain the anomalous opening of the Atlantic Ocean in the equatorial region. However, theoretical calculations for the equatorial stress field developed in this work demonstrate that a cold and rigid equatorial lithosphere would have resulted in a stress rotation opposite to that inferred from geological observations. Additionally, the presence of a cold and rigid lithosphere contrasts with the tomographic results developed for the Borborema Province. Thus, a new tectonic model for the opening of the Atlantic Ocean in the equatorial region is proposed, in which Precambrian structures and lithospheric delamination – assisted by the St. Helena mantle plume – would have been responsible for stress transfer and rotation during the various rifting stages across the Equatorial region.