Mineral deposits and occurrences in the Arabian–Nubian shield / Месторождения полезных ископаемых и рудопроявления Аравийско-Нубийского щита

The “Supercontinents” constitute the majority of the ancient Earth’s surface and play an important role in Earth’s history (Meert 2012). Supercontinent defined as a large, solid, homogeneous massif of the Earth’s crust, which contains nearly all the continental crust of the planet. It is believed that the largest part of the continental crust formed in the period of 3,200–2,500 million years (Ma) and its fragments are included in all the modern continents (Lubnina and Slabunov 2011). There are several attempts made by many researchers to reconstruct continents, large continental masses, and cratons, to provide a primary information for understanding what has been happened in the past during the Earth’s history. This information includes ancient paleogeography, paleoclimatology, paleobiology, earth tectonics, mantle dynamics, and important knowledge on the origin of regional metallogenesis (e.g., Bleeker 2003; Rogers and Santosh 2003; Evans and Pisarevsky 2009; Vérard 2019a, b; Vérard 2021). According to the “continental drift” theory of Wegener 1912), the current continents resulted from breakup, fragmentation, and drifting of  what so-called as “Pangaea” supercontinent, some 200 Ma ago. Studying the origins of the orogenic belts proved that “Pangaea” was not the only giant continent during Earth’s history spanning more than 4.6 billion years. It was preceded by at least twice assemblies of the entire continents, one of them is in the Paleo-Mesoproterozoic called “Columbia”, and this supercontinent was formed about 1,800 Ma ago, and began to separate, fracture, and rifting since 1,500 Ma ago. The second possible assembly of the continents supposed to be at the end of the “Mesoproterozoic” era, where the continental masses merged to form “Rodinia” supercontinent, which was existed during the period between 1,100 and 700 Ma ago. <...>