Geomagnetic Secular Variations at the Permian-Triassic Boundary and Pulsed Magmatism During Eruption of the Siberian Traps

Abstract

©2019. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. The tempo of Large Igneous Province emplacement is crucial to determining the environmental consequences of magmatism on the Earth. Based on detailed flow-by-flow paleomagnetic data from the most representative Permian-Triassic Siberian Traps lava stratigraphy of the northern Siberian platform, we present new constraints on the rate and duration of the volcanic activity in the Norilsk and Maymecha-Kotuy regions. Our data indicate that volcanic activity there occurred during a limited number of short volcanic pulses, each consisting of multiple individual eruptions, and that the total duration of discrete eruption pulses did not exceed ~10,000 years (hiatuses are not included). Our study confirms the occurrence of a thick interval in the lower part of the Norilsk lava sections, which contains a record of geomagnetic reversal and excursion. Based on combined evidence from paleomagnetic secular variation and typical timescales for such reversals, we conclude that the ~1-km-thick lava stratigraphy, corresponding to ~20,000 km 3 of basalt, of the Kharaelakh, Norilsk, and Imangda troughs was formed during a brief, but voluminous, eruptive period of several thousand years or less. Our data further suggest that the ore-bearing Norilsk-type intrusions are coeval or nearly coeval with the boundary between the Morongovsky and Mokulaevsky formations. We calculated a new Siberian Permian-Triassic paleomagnetic pole Norilsk-Maymecha-Kotuy (NMK): PLat = 52.9°, PLong = 147.1°, A95 = 4.3°, K = 23.2, and N = 49 lava flows. It is shown that geomagnetic field variations circa 252 Ma were similar to those observed in the latest Cenozoic.