Neoproterozoic and Hercynian metamorphic events in the Central Mauritanides: Implications for the geodynamic evolution of West Africa

Field and petrostructural investigations in the Central Mauritanides provide new precisions on the polyorogenic character of the nappe edifice of this belt. The upper structural unit exposed in the Gaouâ area includes anatectic gneisses and high-grade metasediments affected by medium temperature, high-pressure metamorphism and cut by granitoids. They represent a basement unconformably overlain by a monometamorphic cover, the Gaouâ Group, of assumed lower Paleozoic age. Late Paleozoic regional metamorphism of metapelites from this cover is characterized by pyrophyllite–kyanite–chloritoid assemblages equilibrated at T around 420 °C and P = 1 GPa. In the lower structural unit exposed in the south around Boufkerine-Farkâkâ, metapelites of the Gadel Group display slightly retrogressed garnet–kyanite–staurolite–rutile assemblages that equilibrated at T around 600 °C and P ⩾ 1.2 GPa before the intrusion of 639 Ma old plutons . The Gadel Group locally overlies in unconformity polycyclic gneisses. This continental assemblage represents an outboard terrane inserted between two monocyclic greenschist facies terranes: remnants of oceanic lithosphere in the east and arc-derived metasediments and metavolcanics cut by 670 Ma old calc-alkaline plutons in the west. All units have been involved in late Paleozoic nappes emplaced to the east above the West African craton and its late Neoproterozoic to Cambro-ordovician cover. Though an east-directed vergence is locally recorded in the Neoproterozoic units, most early E-W trending stretching and mineral lineations are synchronous with greenschist facies metamorphism developed during the Late Paleozoic and roughly coeval with the Applachian nappe system.