Around 600 million years ago sections from the older continent Rodinia collided in an extensive worldwide mountain building event known as the PanAfrican/Brasiliano orogen. Several branches from these orogenic terranes are nowadays exposed in Brazil, such as the Borborema, Tocantins and the Mantiqueira orogens [Brito Neves et al, 1999]. In this work we focus a segment of the Mantiqueira system: the region of Espírito Santo, north of Rio de Janeiro, which is well known for its prosperous dimension stone industry. Brasiliano-aged granites, gneisses, migmatites and marbles from this region are exported all over the world and make up nowadays around 47% of the total Brazilian stone industry.
During the last 25 years, after detailed geological mapping, geochemical and geochronological studies, a deeper understanding of its geological evolution has emerged. Most of the rocks cropping out in this region are of Brasiliano/ PanAfrican age and belong to the monocyclic Araçuai-Ribeira Mobile Belt surrounding the São Francisco Craton (Figure 1).
This paper reviews geological, geochemical and geochronological studies on Espírito Santo focusing on magmatic events. It starts with an overview of the regional geology followed by the chronology of tectonic events. In this way the first units to be outlined will be the high-grade gneisses (~580 Ma), which intruded short after the main collisional phase (~590 Ma). The paper then focus on the early post-collisional magmatic phase (575-560Ma) when enderbites are formed in the coastal region. After that, it covers the late post-collisional to post-orogenic phase (~530 to 480 Ma), which took place after a period of magmatic quiescence, when several bimodal plutonic complexes intrude the previous sequences. In the appendix, we present a field guide for the surroundings of the town of Guarapari, where early post-collisional enderbites crop out, and for the regions of Santa Angélica, Castelo and Pedra Azul plutons, where late post-collisional plutons crop out.
