Jarred Cain Lloyd , Wolfgang V Preiss, Alan S. Collins , Georgina M Virgo, Morgan L. Blades , Sarah E Gilbert, Kathryn J Amos

The glaciogenic nature of the Yudnamutana Subgroup was first identified over a century ago, and its global significance was recognised shortly after, eventually culminating with the global Sturtian Glaciation and Snowball Earth theory. Much debate on the origin and timing of these rocks, locally and globally, has ensued in the years since. A significant corpus of research on the lithology, sedimentology, geochronology, and formal lithostratigraphy of these sequences globally has attempted to resolve many of these debates. In the type area for the Sturtian Glaciation, South Australia’s Adelaide Superbasin, lithostratigraphy and sedimentology have been well understood; however, formal stratigraphic nomenclature has remained complicated and contested. Geochronology has also been extremely sparse in this area. The result of these longstanding issues has been disagreement as to whether the sedimentary rocks of the Yudnamutana Subgroup are truly correlative throughout South Australia, and if they were deposited in the same time window recently defined for Sturtian glacial rocks globally, c. 717 Ma to c. 660 Ma. In this study we present a large detrital zircon study, summarise and compile existing global geochronology for the Sturtian Glaciation, and provide an updated formal lithostratigraphy. We show equivalence of the rocks that comprise the revised Sturt Formation of the Yudnamutana Subgroup, and that it was deposited within the time span globally defined for Sturtian Glaciation.