The Blue Nile Basin, situated in the Northwestern Ethiopian Plateau, contains 1400 m thick Mesozoic sedimentary section underlain by Neoproterozoic basement rocks and overlain by Early–Late Oligocene and Quaternary volcanic rocks. This study outlines the stratigraphic and structural evolution of the Blue Nile Basin based on field and remote sensing studies along the Gorge of the Nile. The Blue ...

The Hellefjord Schist, a volcaniclastic psammite-pelite formation in the Caledonides of Arctic Norway contains discoidal impressions and apparent tube casts that share morphological and taphonomic similarities to Neoproterozoic stem-holdfast forms. U-Pb zircon geochronology on the host metasediment indicates it was deposited between 437 ± 2 and 439 ± 3 Ma, but also indicates that an inferred ba...

The East African Orogen (EAO) is one of Earth’s great collision zones, where East and West Gondwana collided to form the supercontinent ‘Greater Gondwana’ or ‘Pannotia’ at the end of Neoproterozoic time. There is now sufficient Nd isotopic data for basement rocks of the EAO to yield a useful summary. A total of 449 samples were gleaned from the literature, recalculated to a common value for the...

The Neoproterozoic era was arguably the most revolutionary in Earth history. Extending from 1000 to 541 million years ago, it stands at the intersection of the two great tracts of evolutionary time: on the one side, some three billion years of pervasively microbial 'Precambrian' life, and on the other the modern 'Phanerozoic' biosphere with its extraordinary diversity of large multicellular org...

The behavior of the solid Earth system is often overlooked when the causes of major Neoproteozoic (1000–542 Ma) climate and biosphere events are discussed although ∼20% of the present continental crust formed or was remobilized during this time. Processes responsible for forming and deforming the continental crust during Neoproterozoic time were similar to those of the modern Earth and took pla...

The Bi'r Umq suture zone (BUSZ) in western Saudi Arabia comprises Neoproterozoic oceanic-arc plutonic, volcanosedimentary, and ophiolitic rocks that record some of the earliest magmatic and tectonic events of the East African Orogen in the Arabian–Nubian Shield (ANS). New Nd isotopic analyses are combined with data on zircon inheritance and published isotopic studies to establish the case that ...

The northern Namibian Karoo-aged successions are part of a Gondwana-wide sedimentary system emerging at the Carboniferous–Permian boundary and existing for more than 50 Ma. Karoo Supergroup importance in understanding evolution rift system. This study presents new whole-rock geochemical data combined with detrital zircon morphology as well U−Pb ages Lu−Hf composition late Palaeozoic siliciclast...