Mixed and recycled detrital zircons in the Paleozoic rocks of the Eastern Moroccan Meseta: paleogeographic inferences Accotto, Cristina Martínez Poyatos, David Jesús Azor, Antonio Talavera, Cristina Evans, Noreen Jabaloy Sánchez, Antonio Azdimousa, Ali Tahiri, Abdelfatah El Hadi, Hassan Eastern Moroccan Meseta Paleozoic paleogeography West African Craton U-Pb geochronology Zircon provenance Ministerio de Economía y Competividad (MINECO) of Spain through the project CGL2015-71692-P and the Pre-Doctoral scholarship BES-2016-078168. Zircon analyses and imaging were carried out on the SHRIMP II, LA-ICPMS and SEM facilities at the John de Laeter Centre, Curtin University, with the financial support of the Australian Research Council (LE150100013) and Auscope NCRIS (AQ44 Australian Education Investment Fund program) The paleogeographic evolution of the Moroccan Variscides has been a matter of discussion for several decades, with current theoriesmostly based on classical geological correlations. In this regard, the scarce number of studies devoted to U-Pb geochronological analyses of detrital zircon populations is particularly limiting when trying to ascribe the different domains to a single continental piece either derived from the West African Craton or to different sources, with some located in the Nubian Shield or the SaharanMetacraton. In thiswork, detrital zircon grains from 10 samples of sandstones from the Paleozoic (Ordovician to Devonian) sequence of the Eastern Meseta andMiddle Atlaswere dated in order to identify possible sediment sources and elucidate the paleogeography of this easternmost portion of the Moroccan Variscides. The main detrital zircon populations have Ediacaran-Cryogenian ages (610–670 Ma, related to the Cadomian and/or Pan-African orogeny) and middle Paleoproterozoic ages (1980–2080 Ma, related to the Eburnean orogeny), which are in agreement with previous data from the Western Meseta, suggesting similarity between both Mesetas, and strong West African Craton affinity. Such an affinity verifies themost accepted paleogeographic interpretation considering that theMoroccan Mesetas remained attached to northern Gondwana during the entire Paleozoic period. The main differences between our samples and those from the Western Meseta concern the minor detrital zircon populations, such as the Cambro-Ordovician and the Tonian-Stenian ones. In particular, Eastern Meseta and Middle Atlas samples lack a Cambro-Ordovician detrital zircon population, usually interpreted as related to the rifting that opened the Rheic Ocean. This population is locally reported in the Western Meseta and widely described in southwestern Europe, where magmatism of this age is well known. Furthermore, the most northeastern samples are also characterized by a Tonian-Stenian detrital zircon population (up to 30% of the data), which might imply northeastern African sources (Saharan Metacraton and/or Arabian-Nubian Shield) 2023-12-15T11:36:44Z 2023-12-15T11:36:44Z 2019 journal article Accotto et al. (2019) Mixed and recycled detrital zircons in the Paleozoic rocks of the Eastern Moroccan Meseta: paleogeographic inferences. Lithos. DOI: 10.1016/j.lithos.2019.04.011 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/86240 10.1016/j.lithos.2019.04.011 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier