Early Cretaceous columnar basalts from the Mesoarchean Coorg Block, Southern India: A potential plume-influenced rifting event or a localized magmatic phenomenon?

Abstract

The role of mantle plume in the final stages of rifting of the East Gondwana crustal fragments remains equivocal with only limited evidence so far reported from the southern part of Peninsular India. Here, we report for the first time a suite of columnar basalts from the Mesoarchean Coorg Block in the Southern Granulite Terrain (SGT) of India and characterize these rocks through field, petrological, geochemical, and isotope geochronological studies. The basalts show porphyritic texture with phenocrysts of pyroxene and plagioclase embedded in fine groundmass. Geochemical data reveal tholeiitic flood basalt affinity with affinities of plume-related magmatism. The zircon U-Pb data of the rocks yield a weighted mean age of 137 Ma, thus corresponding to the Valanginian Age of the Early Cretaceous Period. We suggest the possible geochemical affinity of the studied rocks Kerguelen plume basalts which provide new insights into magmatism associated with the final stages of East Gondwana rifting.

Keywords

Southern granulite terrain / Valanginian magmatism / Columnar basalts / Plume magmatism / East Gondwana

CRediT authorship contribution statemen

S.G. Dhanil Dev: Writing - original draft, Validation. Pooja Pra-deep: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Investiga-tion, Formal analysis. Chengxue Yang: Visualization, Formal analysis. Anoop Sooraj: Visualization, Investigation, Formal analy-sis. P.K. Krishnaprasad: Visualization. K.V. Sarath: Investigation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely acknowledge the invaluable guidance and constructive feedback provided by Prof. M. Santosh and Prof. E. Shaji, which greatly contributed to the improvement of this work. We sincerely thank Dr. Federico Lucci, Associate Editor, for his valuable insights and suggestions, which enhanced the quality of our manuscript. We thank Dr. Ram Mohan, National Geophysical Research Laboratory, Hyderabad, India, for help with generating the geochemical data reported in this study. We acknowledge Dr. R.S. Prasanth, M.G University and V Deepchand, Department of Geology, University of Kerala, for their valuable help during field-work. The fieldwork component is supported by the "Startup Grant for the University Teachers" of the University of Kerala.

Appendix A. Supplementary Data

Supplementary Data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2025.102058.

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