The sole of an ophiolite: the Ordovician Bay of Islands Complex, Newfoundland

The early Ordovician (c. 485 Ma) Bay of Islands Ophiolite Complex was obducted onto the Laurentian rifted margin as the fore-arc of an oceanic arc that collided with the margin during the mid-Ordovician (c. 470 Ma). The subduction zone was nucleated on an oceanic transform-fracture zone, part of whose remnants occur as the polyphase-deformed and intruded mafic and ultramafic rocks of the Coastal Complex. The ophiolite formed as a suprasubduction-zone fore-arc ophiolite at the spatial and temporal continuation of the ridge normal to the transform-fracture zone-subduction zone system and NE of a trench-trench-ridge triple junction. A two-pyroxene garnet granulite-garnet amphibolite-epidote amphibolite mafic metamorphic sole at the base of the ophiolite was generated, roughly synchronously with the ophiolite, by the metamorphism of mid-ocean ridge basalt mafic rocks in the descending slab at about 10 kbar and quickly attached to the base of the overlying ophiolite during slab flattening, and not by subduction zone extrusion. The metamorphic sole is not a metamorphic aureole at the base of a hot obducting ophiolite. Plate slip vector triangles around the triple junction, before collision and during obduction, are constructed from the orientation of dykes in the sheeted complex and the trends of structures in the high-to lower-temperature parts of the sole and the obducted nappes of oceanic and continental margin rocks beneath the ophiolite. Linear structures in the sole amphibolites trend NNW (the subduction direction); those in the greenschist-facies, obducted, oceanic and continental margin rocks trend WSW (the obduction direction).