An Overview of Cape Fold Belt Geochronology: Implications for Sediment Provenance and the Timing of Orogenesis

Abstract

The Cape Fold Belt (CFB) is a 1300 km long fold-and-thrust mountain belt along the western and southern coastlines of South Africa. A limited understanding of the sedimentary provenance history and poor constraints on the timing of deformation has restricted the ability to provide a coherent tectonic model for the evolution of the CFB. Provenance studies on the Cape Supergroup, which dominates CFB outcrop, are largely limited to U-Pb dating of detrital zircons, which indicate the Namaqua-Natal Metamorphic Complex and Pan-African orogenic belts as likely sources for much of the detritus. Early geochronological studies constraining the timing of deformation in the CFB utilized 40Ar/39Ar step-h..