From supercontinent to superplate: Late Paleozoic Pangea's inner deformation suggests it was a short-lived superplate Pastor Galán, Daniel Pangea Supercontinent Superplate Orocline Permian Paleotethys Rheic Thorough and constructive reviews by J. Brendan Murphy and an anonymous reviewer improved greatly this paper. I would like to acknowledge (in alphabetical order) Mark Dekkers, John Geissman, Gabriel Gutierrez-Alonso, Stephen Johnston, Cor Langereis, Patrick Meere, Tatsuki Tsujimori, and Rob van der Voo for endless discussions about the reconstruction. This paper is a contribution to UNESCO's IGCP 648: Supercontinent Cycles & Global Geodynamics project and it is dedicated to the career of Rob van der Voo. This work has been funded by a post-doctoral fellowship from The Netherlands Research Centre for Integrated Solid Earth Sciences (ISES), a fellowship for overseas researchers from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) (grant P16329) and a MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI Grant (JP16F16329) and a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. I especially thank all the beats Charles Robert Watts has ever made. The author declares no competing interest. The supercontinent cycle explains how landmasses amalgamate into supercontinents that dismember after a ~ 100 Myr tenure in a quasi-periodic manner. Supercontinents are thought to be rigid superplates whose formation controls many of the Earth's secular variations, from long-term climate trends to global mantle circulation. Pangea, the latest continental superplate, formed ~330 Ma, began to rift ~240 Ma, finally broke-up ~200 Ma, is generally considered the template for all previous supercontinents. The existence of Pangea as a superplate at ~330 Ma is inconsistent with: (i) the kinematic constraints of the continent-continent collision that became progressively younger westwards and it only ended in the early Permian times in its westernmost side; (ii) the widespread ‘post-orogenic’ magmatism in the core of Pangea and the hot high-pressure metamorphism in the Paleotethys; and (iii) the global paleomagnetic database that shows paleolatitudinal overlaps between the participating continents, and significant vertical axis rotations in the core of Pangea between 330 and 270 Ma, which suggests >1500 km of shortening and extension. Here I present a tectonic reconstruction that reconciles the paleomagnetic and geological discrepancies. In this model, after the initial amalgamation of Pangea as a landmass, the comprising plates kept on interacting between each other and the asthenosphere during the late Carboniferous and early Permian (320–270 Ma) instead of being a rigid plate. After that and concomitant with a plate reorganization, Pangea finally established as a superplate for a brief period of <70 Myr. This superplate tenure might be, following most recent models, too short to control the global mantle circulation. 2022-04-29T07:12:09Z 2022-04-29T07:12:09Z 2022-01-11 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Daniel Pastor-Galán, From supercontinent to superplate: Late Paleozoic Pangea's inner deformation suggests it was a short-lived superplate, Earth-Science Reviews, Volume 226, 2022, 103918, ISSN 0012-8252, [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.103918] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/74638 10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.103918 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España Elsevier