The drift history of Adria and Africa from 280 Ma to Present, Jurassic true polar wander, and zonal climate control on Tethyan sedimentary facies

article i nfo The orogenic belts surrounding the undeformed Adriatic Sea represent the margins of an area known as Adria, the African promontory. We have undertaken a critical appraisal of paleomagnetic data from regions of Adria considered parautochthonous relative to Africa, obtained either from biostratigraphically dated sed- imentary rocks, corrected for inclination shallowing, or from igneous rocks that are regarded as free from any inclination shallowing bias. Paleomagnetic directions were used to calculate paleomagnetic poles for compar- ison with coeval, and inclination flattening-free, paleomagnetic poles from stable Africa. Visual coherence of paleopoles for several time slices from the Early Permian to the Eocene supports the construction of a com- posite apparent polar wander path (APWP) valid for parautochthonous Adria and stable Africa. This compos- ite APWP is compared to previous APWPs, finding good agreement with the global APWP of Kent and Irving (2010). Both APWPs show a remarkable and rapid polar shift of ~40° in the Jurassic that other APWPs tend to underestimate. We interpret this shift to represent a major episode of true polar wander (TPW), from ~183 Ma in the Early Jurassic to ~151 Ma in the Late Jurassic. Using a simple zonal climate model, the drift motion of Adria attached to Africa appears to be consistent with the distribution of Permian-Cretaceous sed- imentary facies on Adria.