Central Atlantic Magmatic Province
The Central Atlantic magmatic province (CAMP) is the Earth's largest continental large igneous province, covering an area of roughly 11 million km2. It is composed mainly of basalt that formed prior to the breakup of Pangaea in the Mesozoic Era, near the end of the Triassic and the beginning of the Jurassic periods. The subsequent breakup of Pangaea created the Atlantic Ocean and provided a legacy of basaltic dikes, sills, and lavas over a vast area around the present central North Atlantic Ocean, including large deposits in northwest Africa, southwest Europe, as well as northeast South and southeast North America (found as continental thoeliitic basalts in subaerial flows and intrusive bodies). The name and CAMP acronym were proposed by Andrea Marzoli (Marzoli et al. 1999) and adopted at a symposium held at the 1999 Spring Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
The CAMP volcanic eruptions occurred about 201 million years ago and split into four pulses lasting for over ~600,000 years. The resulting large igneous province is, in area covered, the most extensive on earth. The volume of magma flow of ~2–3 × 106 km3 makes it one of the most voluminous as well.
This geologic event is associated with the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event.
Although some connections among these basalts had long been recognized, in 1988 they were linked as constituting a single major flood basalt province (Rampino & Stothers 1988). The basaltic sills of similar age (near 200 Ma, or earliest Jurassic) and composition (intermediate-Ti quartz tholeiite) which occur across the vast Amazon River basin of Brazil were linked to the province in 1999 (Marzoli et al. 1999). Remnants of CAMP have been identified on four continents (Africa, Europe, North America and South America) and consist of thoeliitic basalts formed during the opening of the Atlantic Ocean basin during the breakup of the Pangean supercontinent (Blackburn et al. 2013).
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