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1 School of Earth Sciences, Leeds University, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK M.Wilson{at}earth.leeds.ac.uk
2 Physics of Geological Processes, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1048, Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
3 Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Vrije University, De Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands
4 Institut für Geowissenschaften, Universität Potsdam, Postfach 60 15 53, 14415 Potsdam, Germany
5 Institute for Geology, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047, Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
6 Norsk Hydro ASA/Saga Petroleum ASA, Oslo, Norway
An extensive rift system developed within the northern foreland of the Variscan orogenic belt during Late Carboniferous-Early Permian times, post-dating the Devonian-Early Carboniferous accretion of various Neoproterozoic Gondwana-derived terranes on to the southern margin of Laurussia (Laurentia-Baltica; Fig. 1). Rifting was associated with widespread magmatism and with a fundamental change, at the Westphalian-Stephanian boundary, in the regional stress field affecting western and central Europe (Ziegler 1990; Ziegler & Cloetingh 2003). The change in regional stress patterns was coincident with the termination of orogenic activity in the Variscan fold belt, followed by major dextral translation between North Africa and Europe.
Rifting propagated across a collage of basement terranes with different ages and thermal histories. Whilst most of the Carboniferous-Permian rift basins of NW Europe developed on relatively thin lithosphere, the highly magmatic Oslo Graben in southern Norway initiated within the thick, stable and, presumably, strong (cold) lithosphere of the Fennoscandian craton. The rift basins in the North Sea, in contrast, developed in younger Caledonian age lithosphere, which was both thinner and warmer than the lithosphere of the craton to the east.
A regional hiatus, corresponding to the Early Stephanian, is evident in much of the Variscan foreland, with Stephanian and Early Permian red beds unconformably overlying truncated Westphalian series (e.g. McCann 1996) (Fig. 2). Regional uplift coincides with the onset of voluminous magmatism across the region, raising the possibility that uplift could have been related to the presence of a widespread thermal anomaly within the upper mantle (i.e. a mantle plume or, possibly, several plumes). In
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