Abstract
The southwestern continental margin of India reveals the presence of an anomalous bathymetric high feature located in the mid-continental slope region off Trivandrum. Based on the analysis of the available geophysical data and plate tectonic reconstruction, this feature was interpreted as a scar of India-Madagascar separation, with its conjugate identified on the Northern Madagascar Ridge. Although the conjugate nature of the Alleppey-Trivandrum Terrace Complex and the Northern Madagascar Ridge was postulated, this inference has not yet been evaluated by comparing their geophysical signatures and crustal structure. The present study is aimed to derive and compare the crustal configuration of these two features using an up-to-date compilation of the bathymetry, gravity and magnetic data, and by employing integrated forward modelling of gravity and magnetic anomalies. Our derived crustal models for the Alleppey-Trivandrum Terrace Complex and the Northern Madagascar Ridge suggest that both these features can be explained in terms of thinned continental crust intermingled with volcanic intrusives. The crustal thicknesses of the Northern Madagascar Ridge and Alleppey-Trivandrum Terrace Complex at their conjugate continent-ocean boundaries are ~ 17 km and both these features are associated with high amplitude magnetic anomalies whose genesis is attributed to the volcanism caused by the Marion hotspot activity. Therefore, based on our integrated interpretation of the geophysical data, we support the earlier interpretation on conjugate nature of the Northern Madagascar Ridge and the Alleppey-Trivandrum Terrace Complex that was proposed based on the fitting of shape and size of the bathymetric notch observed in the southeastern continental margin of Madagascar with a bathymetric protrusion observed in the southwestern continental margin of India in the India-Madagascar pre-drift scenario. These features remained as a single unit prior to ~ 88 Ma and subsequently got separated during the India-Madagascar breakup.
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Datasets generated during the current study are confidential and is deposited at the Marine Geoscientific database being managed by NCPOR.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Dr. M. Ravichandran, Director, National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR), Goa, and Prof. Sunil Kumar Singh, Director, CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography (CSIR- NIO), Goa, for their permission to publish the present work. This study forms a part of the PhD work of CMB at Goa University. We thank Dr. K.A. Kamesh Raju and Dr. G.N. Nayak for their constructive comments at various stages of the present work. We are indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which helped us to improve the readability of the paper. We are grateful to Dr. Claudio Lo Iacono for the editorial handling of the manuscript. We thank the shipboard scientific party, officers and crew members of the MGS-03, MGS-04, and MGS-08 expeditions conducted onboard MGS Sagar, and SSD-059 expedition onboard RV Sindhu Sadhana, for extending their support. Directorate General of Hydrocarbons, New Delhi is thanked for providing the multichannel seismic reflection sections used in the present study. For plotting the figures presented in this paper, we used Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software (Wessel et al. 2019). This is NCPOR contribution J-79/2021-22 and NIO contribution 6887.
Funding
Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Government of India provided the financial support to carry out the work through the ‘Geoscientific Studies of Exclusive Economic Zone of India’ Programme under grant no. MoES/EFC/28/2018-PC-II.
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Bijesh, C.M., Yatheesh, V., Kurian, P.J. et al. Conjugate nature of the Alleppey-Trivandrum Terrace Complex with the Northern Madagascar Ridge in the early opening model of the Arabian Sea: evaluation based on an integrated geophysical investigation. Mar Geophys Res 43, 14 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11001-022-09469-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11001-022-09469-x