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The Mid-Cretaceous Peninsular Ranges Orogeny: a New Slant on Cordilleran Tectonics? I: Mexico to Nevada

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The Mid-Cretaceous Peninsular Ranges Orogeny: a New Slant on Cordilleran Tectonics? I: Mexico to Nevada Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences The mid-Cretaceous Peninsular Ranges orogeny: a new slant on Cordilleran tectonics? I: Mexico to Nevada Journal: Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences Manuscript ID cjes-2020-0154.R2 Manuscript Type: Article Date Submitted by the 04-Dec-2020 Author: Complete List of Authors: Hildebrand, Robert; hbrand Geoscience, Whalen, Joseph; Geological Survey of Canada orogeny, North American Cordillera, arc magmatism, slab failure Keyword: magmatism,Draft Peninsular Ranges Orogeny, arc-continent collision Is the invited manuscript for consideration in a Special Not applicable (regular submission) Issue? : © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Page 1 of 56 Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences The mid-Cretaceous Peninsular Ranges orogeny: a new slant on Cordilleran tectonics? I: Mexico to Nevada HILDEBRAND, Robert S.,* 1401 N. Camino de Juan, Tucson, AZ 85745 USA WHALEN, Joseph B., Geological Survey of Canada, 601 Booth Street, Ottawa, ON K1A 0E8, Canada *[email protected] Draft © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences Page 2 of 56 2 Abstract The Peninsular Ranges orogeny occurred during the mid-Cretaceous at ~100 Ma and affected rocks from southern Mexico to Alaska. The event resulted from the closing of an early Cretaceous marine arc trough, named the Bisbee-Arperos seaway in Mexico and Arizona, and the Cinko Lake arc trough in the Sierra Nevada. The trough was an ocean that formed after the late Jurassic-early Cretaceous Nevadan orogeny and associated post-collisional magmatism. It was open for ~40 Myr and closed by westward subduction. Here, we focus initially on the most complete cross-section, located in southwestern Mexico, where a west-facing Albian carbonate platform, with subjacent siliciclastic rocks built on the western margin of North America, was pulled down into a trench at 100 Ma, buried in hemipelagic mud and Cenomanian flysch, then overthrust from the west by rocks of the 140-100 Ma Santiago Peak-Alisitos arc and its substrate, the Guerrero Superterrane, which collectively document westerly subduction. This tectonically thickened collision zone was exhumed and intruded by 99-84 Ma distinctive post-collisional tonalite-granodiorite plutonic complexes, all with Sr/Y > 20, Sm/Yb > 2.5, Nb/Y > 0.4, and La/Yb > 10. These geochemical features are typical of slab failure, not arc magmas. The post-collisional plutons, previously considered to represent arc flare-ups, were derived from melting of the descending slab following arc-continent collision. Remnants of the arc, basin, related east-vergent 100 Ma thrusts, flexural foredeep, and 99-84 Ma slab failure plutons are traced from the Peninsular Ranges, through the Mojave Desert to the Sierra Nevada where similar rocks, relations, and ages occur. Along the western, back-arc, side of the orogen after collision and slab break-off, but during exhumation, east-dipping reverse faults with >10 km of east-side up movement shed 100-85 Ma plutonic and other debris westward from the hinterland into troughs such as the Valle and Great Valley. We extend our synthesis northward, from west-central Nevada to Alaska, in Part II. Keywords orogeny, North American Cordillera, arc magmatism,Draft arc-continent collision, slab failure magmatism, Peninsular Ranges orogeny © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Page 3 of 56 Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 3 It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. —MARK TWAIN Introduction In 1969, Warren Hamilton published two seminal papers in which he inferred – based in part on the Cenozoic volcanic belt of the Andes – that thousands of km of oceanic lithosphere were swept against, and subducted beneath, western North America to generate the great Mesozoic batholithic belt and the ensimatic and chaotic Franciscan Formation (Hamilton, 1969a, b). At about the same time, Dickinson (1970) noted the similarity of ages across California and so linked strongly deformed rocks of the high-pressure, low-temperature Franciscan complex with sedimentary rocks of the Great Valley Group and plutons of the Sierran-Klamath batholith as a trench fill – forearc basin – arc batholith tectonic association (Figure 1). This concept quickly evolved into a more generalized hypothesis in which the trench fill-forearc basin-batholithic assemblage, interpreted to be the products of eastward subduction beneath western Laurentia, had an associated fold-thrust belt, located well to the east, with mostly westerly dipping thrust faults developed in heated retro-arc crust, and an adjacent, but even more easterly, foreland basin (Burchfiel and Davis, 1972; Armstrong and Dick,Draft 1974; Dickinson, 1976). A half-century later the essence of this model is still in vogue and rarely challenged, so the notion of eastward subduction beneath North America – especially for the great batholithic belts of the Sierra Nevada, Peninsular Ranges, and Coast plutonic complex – has become a formidable paradigm. Although several contributions have challenged this paradigm (Moores, 1970; Mattauer et al. 1983; Chamberlain and Lambert, 1985; Lambert and Chamberlain, 1988; Johnston, 2008; Hildebrand, 2009, 2013; Hildebrand and Whalen, 2014, 2017; Hildebrand et al., 2018), they were, in many cases, broad syntheses covering several orogenies through time and so these ideas failed to generate traction within the Cordilleran community. In the aftermath of the recent kerfuffle about the polarity of subduction in the northern Cordillera (Sigloch and Mihalynuk, 2020; Pavlis et al., 2020), it seemed to us worthwhile and timely to describe a little known, mid-Cretaceous orogeny that can be traced along the length of the North American Cordillera from southern Mexico to Alaska, and perhaps beyond, as it provides evidence on the polarity of subduction in the northern Cordillera. We call it the Peninsular Ranges orogeny after the region where we first recognized it, and because the most-complete cross-sections of the orogen are exposed there and in adjacent Mexico. Although we have argued that other orogenies within the Cordillera involved eastward-facing arcs, we focus on the Peninsular Ranges orogen because it entailed several of the world's most-impressive Cordilleran type batholiths, which, for over 50 years, have been taken as proof-positive evidence for eastward subduction beneath North America. We approach the overall geology of the orogen from south to north, and our goal is to demonstrate why we find the long-ingrained hypothesis for eastward subduction flawed and untenable. The Peninsular Ranges orogen in its type area © The Author(s) or their Institution(s) Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences Page 4 of 56 4 In Southern and Baja California, the largely chaparral-covered mountains expose remnants of the early Cretaceous Santiago Peak-Alisitos arc terrane, comprising shallow-marine clastic and carbonate sedimentary rocks, deep-water turbiditic fan deposits, basaltic to rhyolitic volcanic rocks, and 128-99 Ma, calcic, epizonal intrusions ranging from gabbro to granite (Allison, 1974; White and Busby-Spera, 1987; Almazán-Vásquez, 1988a, b; Johnson et al., 2003, Wetmore et al., 2005; Busby et al., 2006; Herzig and Kimbrough, 2014; Clausen et al., 2014; Morris et al., 2019). In California, the basement to the volcano-sedimentary cover is dominantly composed of metamorphosed and deformed Jurassic to Triassic metaturbidites, migmatitic schists, gneisses, and granodioritic plutons, but farther south on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, carbonates and quartzites of Paleozoic age also occur (Shaw et al., 2003; Todd, 2004; Gastil and Miller, 1981; Gastil et al., 1991; Gastil, 1993). Near San Diego, an uppermost Jurassic succession of marine volcaniclastic rocks, collectively named the Peñasquitos Formation, was folded, in places even overturned, prior to deposition of the Santiago Peak rocks (Kimbrough et al., 2014a). To the south in Baja California (Figure 2), arc successions overstep several subterrane boundaries with the Guerrero superterrane (Centeno-García et al., 2008), and after Cenozoic opening of the Gulf of California is restored, form a continuous lithostratigraphic unit onto the mainland in Zihuatanejo (Centeno-García et al., 2011; Duque-Trujillo et al., 2015). Thus, the arc formed atop and intruded rocks of the Guerrero superterrane as noted by Dickinson and Lawton (2001). The intrusions, dated at 128-99 Ma (ToddDraft et al., 2003; Wetmore et al., 2005; Premo et al., 2014; Shaw et al., 2014), were informally termed the Escondido plutons (Clausen et al., 2014) whereas we called the same bodies, the Santa Ana suite (Hildebrand and Whalen, 2014). These plutons are both normally and reversely zoned, isotropic to foliated, locally protomylonitic, sheeted intrusive complexes, varying in composition from tonalite through quartz diorite and granodiorite to leucomonzogranite, locally with abundant wall rock screens and mafic inclusions, and containing varying proportions of mafic enclaves (Todd et al. 2003; Todd 2004). Morton et al. (2014) noted that the westernmost intrusions are isotropic whereas those farther east are foliated, so that there is a megascopically visible deformation gradient from west to east, especially evident in enclaves. In the east, cumulate layering in gabbroic plutons is now mostly steeply dipping; intrusive contacts are folded, in many places isoclinally, along with their wall rocks. The mineral foliation is steep and commonly transects external contacts; and dykes of one
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