Late Palaeozoic intra- and pericratonic basins on the East European Craton and its margins

Abstract

The (Mid-) Late Devonian to Early Carboniferous was a time of widespread rifting on the East European Craton (EEC) and its margins. The most prominent basin among these and, accordingly, the best documented is the Dniepr-Donets Basin (DDB) in Ukraine and southern Russia. The DDB is associated with voluminous rift-related magmatism and broad basement uplift. Two other large, extensional, basin systems developed along the margins of the EEC at the same time: the East Barents Basin (EEB) and its onshore prolongation the Timan-Pechora Basin (TPB), and the Peri-Caspian Basin (PCB). Rifting, associated magmatism, and possible domal basement uplift are also reported elsewhere within the EEC, suggesting a common, 'active', rifting process, involving a cluster of thermal instabilities (or generalized thermal instability) at the base of the lithosphere beneath widely separated parts of the EEC by Mid-Late Devonian times. The DDB is an intracratonic rift basin, cutting across the Archaean-Palaeoproterozoic structural grain of its basement and, as such, differs from the EBB -TPB and PCB, which are pericratonic rift basins developed on reworked and juvenile crystalline basement accreted to the EEC during the Neoproterozoic. The DDB opened into a deep basin, possibly having oceanic lithospheric affinity, to the SE, in the area where it adjoins the southern PCB, suggesting the possibility that rifting led to (limited?) continental break-up in this area at this time. Post-rift compressional tectonic reactivations and basin inversion in the DDB, leading to the formation of its prominent Donbas Foldbelt segment, are related to Tethyan events (Cimmerian and Alpine orogenies) occurring on the nearby southern margin of the EEC. Post-rift compressional inversions in the PCB and TPB, which lie closer to the Urals margin of the EEC, are related to Uralian tectonics.

Sequence stratigraphy and onlap history of the Donets Basin, Ukraine: Insight into Carboniferous icehouse dynamics

“…The unusual thickness of the Carboniferous succession in the Donets Basin has been attributed to high rates of subsidence driven by tectonic reactivation in the region Stephenson et al, 2006). Our high-precision U-Pb and biostratigraphically constrained record of long-term accommodation in the Donets Basin (Fig.…”

“…Subsidence slowed significantly in the Early Permian (Fig. 2) and the southeastern part of the basin was tectonically inverted in the late Paleozoic and Mesozoic Stephenson et al, 2006). Notably, the sub-parallel trends in both up-dip and down-dip locations on the Donets longterm accumulation curves (Fig.…”

“…1; Stephenson et al, 2001;McCann et al, 2003). Thermal post-rift subsidence during the late Mississippian through Pennsylvanian permitted the accumulation of an up to 14 km sedimentary wedge (Stephenson et al, 2006;Sachsenhofer et al, in press). Subsidence slowed significantly in the Early Permian (Fig.…”

TOPO-EUROPE: The geoscience of coupled deep Earth-surface processes

“…Paleozoic subsidence of the contiguous Peri-Caspian Basin, which contains one of the thickest known sedimentary sequences (25+km) and has a huge hydrocarbon potential, could be related to similar lithospheric processes, but large-scale mechanisms to explain the subsidence of the entire southern part of the EEP have not yet been thoroughly examined (cf. Saintot et al, 2006;Stephenson et al, 2006). …”

Baltica in the Cryogenian, 850–630 Ma

“…It is generally considered to be Precambrian although Zonenshain et al (1990) hypothesised that it comprised Devonian oceanic crust (cf. Stephenson et al, 2006). The basement of the Astrakhan Dome, a structural high in the southern Peri-Caspian Basin, is consistently interpreted as Precambrian in age from numerous integrated seismic and potential field studies (e.g.…”