Jurassic History of the Central Sierra Nevada and the ‘Nevadan’ Orogeny

Albino, George V.

doi:10.1007/978-94-017-0833-3_20

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Most of these faults are now steep reverse faults, but may have reactivated or obscured earlier "ancestral," or "cryptic," thrust or strike-slip faults (Saleeby, 1981;Day et al, 1985;Edelman et al, 1989b;Albino, 1992). Most of the faulting and associated deformation took place in the Middle and Late Jurassic, prior to the emplacement of the Cretaceous batholith (Day et al, 1985Tobisch et al, 1989;Girty et al, 1995), but may have begun as early as Triassic on the Calaveras-Shoo Fly thrust (Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tectonic setting of the Jurassic Smartville and Slate Creek complexes, northern Sierra Nevada, California

Day

Bickford

2004

Geological Society of America Bulletin

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Jurassic ophiolitic complexes in California and Oregon are widely distributed outboard of a Jurassic and older continental margin. Whether these outboard complexes were exotic and collided with the Jurassic continental margin, or whether they were simply part of a wide forearc to a Jurassic continental magmatic arc, has long been at issue. We have studied two such complexes and crosscutting intrusions in the fault-bounded Central and Western belts of the northern Sierra Nevada. We report new and revised U-Pb (zircon) dates for the EarlyJurassic and younger Slate Creek complex (ca. 203-171 Ma) in the Central belt; the Late Jurassic Smartville complex (159 ± 3 Ma) in the Western belt; and crosscutting intrusions ranging from Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous age. The new ages imply that the Central and Western belts have been part of the same terrane since Middle Jurassic time and that the fault separating them has accommodated only minor displacements since ca. 160 Ma. Isotopic compositions of common Pb indicate derivation from mantle sources, but evidence for inheritance of Precambrian zircon is common in plutons within the Early and Late Jurassic complexes and in Middle Jurassic, Late Jurassic, and Early Cretaceous crosscutting intrusions. Although there are several potential sources for such contamination, the ages of the inherited zircon are consistent with a North American origin. This contamination would have been accomplished most plausibly near the North American margin.

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