Siberia, the Wandering Northern Terrane, and Its Changing Geography Through the Palaeozoic ⁎ L
Earth-Science Reviews 82 (2007) 29–74 www.elsevier.com/locate/earscirev Siberia, the wandering northern terrane, and its changing geography through the Palaeozoic ⁎ L. Robin M. Cocks a, , Trond H. Torsvik b,c,d a Department of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, UK b Center for Geodynamics, Geological Survey of Norway, Leiv Eirikssons vei 39, Trondheim, N-7401, Norway c Institute for Petroleum Technology and Applied Geophysics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 NTNU, Norway d School of Geosciences, Private Bag 3, University of the Witwatersrand, WITS, 2050, South Africa Received 27 March 2006; accepted 5 February 2007 Available online 15 February 2007 Abstract The old terrane of Siberia occupied a very substantial area in the centre of today's political Siberia and also adjacent areas of Mongolia, eastern Kazakhstan, and northwestern China. Siberia's location within the Early Neoproterozoic Rodinia Superterrane is contentious (since few if any reliable palaeomagnetic data exist between about 1.0 Ga and 540 Ma), but Siberia probably became independent during the breakup of Rodinia soon after 800 Ma and continued to be so until very near the end of the Palaeozoic, when it became an integral part of the Pangea Supercontinent. The boundaries of the cratonic core of the Siberian Terrane (including the Patom area) are briefly described, together with summaries of some of the geologically complex surrounding areas, and it is concluded that all of the Palaeozoic underlying the West Siberian
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