Terranes

thumb|upright=1.35|Current extent of Avalonia highlighted in yellow Avalonia was a microcontinent in the Paleozoic era. Crustal fragments of this former microcontinent are terranes in parts of the eastern coast of North America: Atlantic Canada, and parts of the East Coast of the United States. In addition, terranes derived from Avalonia also make up portions of Northwestern Europe, being found in England, Wales and parts of Ireland.

In geology, a terrane (; in full, a tectonostratigraphic terrane) is a crust fragment formed on a tectonic plate (or broken off from it) and accreted or "sutured" to crust lying on another plate. The crustal block or fragment preserves its distinctive geologic history, which is different from the surrounding areas—hence the term "exotic" terrane. The suture zone between a terrane and the crust it attaches to is usually identifiable as a fault. A sedimentary deposit that buries the contact of the terrane with adjacent rock is called an overlap formation. An igneous intrusion that has intruded a

continent

geological complex in Western Australia that is composed of a tectonically interleaved and polydeformed mixture of granite, mafic intrusions and metasedimentary rocks in excess of 3.3 billion years old

piece of continental crust in the Penninic nappes of the Alps

small tectonic unit in the Pannonian Basin in Europe

Arequipa-Antofalla is a basement unit underlying the central Andes in northwestern Argentina, western Bolivia, northern Chile and southern Peru. Geologically, it corresponds to a craton, terrane or block of continental crust. Arequipa-Antofalla collided and amalgamated with the Amazonian craton about 1000 million years ago during the Sunsás orogeny. As a terrane, Arequipa-Antofalla was ribbon-shaped during the Paleozoic, a time when it was bounded in the west by the Iapetus Ocean and in the east by the Puncoviscana Ocean.

fragment of crustal material, sutured to the Eurasian Plate during the Cretaceous that forms present-day southern Tibet

late Mesozoic geologic complex in the California Coast Ranges