Interaction of Siberia and Baltica at the final stage of amalgamation of the Eurasian part of Pangea

The probable relative positions of the Siberian and East European cratons (Siberia and Baltica paleocontinents, respectively) during the Early Permian and the pattern of their movements at the stage of consolidation in the structure of the Pangea supercontinent are reconstructed from the paleomagnetic data. The kinematics of Siberia and Baltica indicates that they belonged to different lithospheric plates during the Permian, but since then they could have moved cooperatively. The structural data for the folded zones surrounding these cratons and the kinematical constraints suggest the most probable scenario of the interaction between Siberia and Baltica during the Permian, in which the motion of Siberia relative to Baltica was a clockwise rotation around the Euler pole located in the southwest of the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago. This interaction between the paleocontinents agrees with the meridional lengthening, i.e., the squeezing out of the structures whose relics currently compose the basement of the West Siberian Plate along the shear zones in the southern and northern directions, and it is verified by the pattern of formation of some distinctive structures in the Central Asian folded belt and Arctic Region.