Chapter 10 Mobile Belts

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the various mobile belts of Southern Hemisphere. The Limpopo Belt is a strip of high-grade polymetamorphic and polytectonic terrane which strikes east-northeast for some 680 km and separates the Rhodesian and Kaapvaal cratons by over 260 km. The north marginal zone of Limpopo Belt falls entirely within Zimbabwe and Botswana. It consists mainly of reworked granite-greenstone terrane, now at the amphibolite or granulite facies, which grades into the Rhodesian craton to the north and passes south, via the Tuli-Sabi Shear Belt, into the Central Zone. The amphibolite-granulite terrane of this zone consists of granite-greenstone material metamorphosed to granulite or amphibolite facies. The granulite terrane in Zimbabwe consists mainly of a sea of granitic granulite gneiss surrounding charnockites, enderbites, and scattered, deformed and folded metasedimentary and meta-igneous inclusions. The Tuli-Sabi Shear Belt extends east-northeast for the length of the Limpopo Belt and is characterized by large-scale cataclasis. The Central Zone is a distinctive unit flanked to the north and south by major shear zones and granulite terranes. It is characterized by complex relationships between what appear to be a repeatedly metamorphosed basement and an intensely metamorphosed cover sequence. It is also characterized by large scale, relatively open folds and dome and basin structures, which generally lie across the trend of the Limpopo Belt.