Formation of Arabian-Nubian Shield Crust
The Arabian-Nubian Shield is the northern half of a great collision zone called the East African Orogen. This collision zone formed near the end of Neoproterozoic time when East and West Gondwana collided to form the supercontinent Gondwana. The most intense part of the collision occurred in what is today southern Africa, where older crust in Tanzania. Mozambique, and Madagascar was remobilized to form the Mozambique Belt. This great collision was responsible for the Pan-African orogeny near the end of Neoproterozoic time. The crust of the Mozambique Belt is quite different from that of the Arabian-Nubian Shield, which is predominantly 'juvenile' crust, that is, crust that formed from partial melting of Earth's mantle, although much older Archean and Paleoproterozoic crustal materials is exposed west of the Nile in Egypt, in the SE part of the shield in Arabia, in eastern Ethiopia, and in Yemen.
The ANS took about 300 million years to form. The oldest rocks associated with the formative cycle of the ANS crust formed by coalescence of Island arcs and back-arc basins and perhaps oceanic plateaus. The oldest rocks associated with this cycle are about 870 million years old and are found in eastern Sudan and SE Arabia. Some of the oldest rocks are ophiolites, which testify that formation of ANS continental crust began with formation of oceanic crust by seafloor spreading, followed by the development of subduction zones and Island arcs. The various island arcs collided and these tectonic terranes sutured together during the time period 780 to 620 Ma to form an increasingly broad and thick nucleus of juvenile continental crust. This thickening resulted in the formation of several suture zones, marked by obduction of ophiolites and intense deformation. Crustal thickening was also accompanied by melting and magmatic fractionation of mafic magmas that ponded deep in the crust. These melts rose upwards to be emplaced as granitic plutons. Magmatism during this episode is characterized by tholeiites and calc-alkaline suites.
The welt of juvenile ANS crust was trapped between great tracts of converging continental crust. A protracted episode of continental collision started at about 610 Ma ago and continued for about 50 million years. Collision was more intense in the south, in the Mozambique Belt, but it also strongly affected the ANS. N-S oriented upright folds and shear zones deformed the arc terranes and sutures in the southern ANS, forming elongate structures such as the Hamisana Shear Zone in NE Sudan. Farther north and east, the ANS was affected by the formation of the great NW-SE trending Najd system of strike-slip faults. The composition of igneous rocks became distinctively more evolved as the collision continued and the crust continued to thicken. Deep erosion, possibly by a continental ice sheet, happened during this time. All tectonic and magmatic activity ended by the time the Cambrian sandstones were deposited, about 530 million years ago.
A number of features have been ascribed to late stage extensional tectonics including a widespread NE-SW trending dyke swarm, NE-SW trending normal faults and NW-SE trending sedimentary basins filled with post-orogenic molasse deposits
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