TitaniQ temperatures and textural analysis as a record of the deformation history in a major continental shear zone system, Borborema Province, Brazil

We combine quartz textural analysis with Titanium-in-quartz (TitaniQ) geothermometry to investigate the late stages of deformation in mylonitic rocks from the Sucuru dike swarm in the Borborema Province. The wide range in TitaniQ temperatures (>340 to 740 degrees C) closely related to grain sizes are attributed to inefficient Ti resetting during bulging (BLG) and subgrain rotation (SGR) recrystallization. The highest temperature values (>500-740 degrees C) occur in the core of quartz ribbons and porphyroclasts. They are interpreted as the record of early-stage plastic deformation, likely during the intrusion of magmatic bodies, and are progressively overprinted during a lower-temperature stage (>340-500 degrees C) associated with intense dynamic recrystallization and production of a large amount of fine-grained matrix. The dominantly weak crystallographic preferred orientations (CPOs) can be attributed to a large variety in crystallographic orientations of parent grains, which control to a large extent the CPO evolution of daughter grains, and to activation of multiple slip systems in the direction (basal, rhomb and prism) due to synkinematic temperature decrease. The CPOs are consistent with strain localized by operation of dislocation creep-accommodated grain boundary sliding (DisGBS) during the lowtemperature stage. DisGBS seems to be less important in coarse pure quartz domains, where moderate to strong CPOs indicate the dominance of dislocation creep. Several evidence of intracrystalline deformation in quartz ribbons and porphyroclasts point to dominant activation of dislocation creep at the early hightemperature stage of deformation, with activation of prism . The dike orientations, geometry and evidence of solid-state deformation in their margins, fit well with progressive E-W dextral shearing, where they intrude and crystallize in a NW-SE direction and rotate clockwise during shearing. This implies that the dextral shear regime that dominated the Borborema province from ca. 600 Ma was still in effect into the Cambrian some 60-70 million years later.

Automated summary

This study combines quartz textural analysis and Titanium-in-quartz geothermometry to investigate the deformation processes in mylonitic rocks from the Sucuru dike swarm in the Borborema Province. The results show a close relationship between TitaniQ temperatures and grain sizes, suggesting inefficient titanium resetting during the recrystallization processes. The study also reveals different deformation mechanisms at different temperature stages.