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Geological Society of America Bulletin Downloaded from gsabulletin.gsapubs.org on January 23, 2013 Geological Society of America Bulletin Early History of the Colorado River in the Basin and Range Province IVO LUCCHITTA Geological Society of America Bulletin 1972;83, no. 7;1933-1948 doi: 10.1130/0016-7606(1972)83[1933:EHOTCR]2.0.CO;2 Email alerting services click www.gsapubs.org/cgi/alerts to receive free e-mail alerts when new articles cite this article Subscribe click www.gsapubs.org/subscriptions/ to subscribe to Geological Society of America Bulletin Permission request click http://www.geosociety.org/pubs/copyrt.htm#gsa to contact GSA Copyright not claimed on content prepared wholly by U.S. government employees within scope of their employment. Individual scientists are hereby granted permission, without fees or further requests to GSA, to use a single figure, a single table, and/or a brief paragraph of text in subsequent works and to make unlimited copies of items in GSA's journals for noncommercial use in classrooms to further education and science. This file may not be posted to any Web site, but authors may post the abstracts only of their articles on their own or their organization's Web site providing the posting includes a reference to the article's full citation. GSA provides this and other forums for the presentation of diverse opinions and positions by scientists worldwide, regardless of their race, citizenship, gender, religion, or political viewpoint. Opinions presented in this publication do not reflect official positions of the Society. Notes Copyright © 1972, The Geological Society of America, Inc. Copyright is not claimed on any material prepared by U.S. government employees within the scope of their employment. Downloaded from gsabulletin.gsapubs.org on January 23, 2013 IVO LUCCHITTA U.S. Geological Survey, Center of Astrogeology, 601 E. Cedar Ave., Flagstaff, Arizona 86001 Early History of the Colorado River in the Basin and Range Province ABSTRACT 18 to 20 m.y. indicate drainage northward, across the present site of Lake Mead, and A reasonable interpretation of the geologic northeastward onto the Colorado Plateau. history of the Colorado River in the Basin and None of these drainages can be interpreted as Range province can be put together by con- being an ancestral Colorado River. The next sidering the work done by several geologists in youngest deposit is the Muddy Creek Forma- the Imperial Valley, California, the Parker- tion, which was laid down in interior basins Blythe-Cibola area, California and Arizona, formed when basin-range faulting disrupted the and, the Lake Mead and Hualapai Plateau older topography and drainage some time after areas, Arizona. 18 to 20 m.y. ago. There was no Colorado River In the Imperial Valley, the Imperial Forma- at this time. Deposition of the Muddy Creek tion, whose age has been interpreted variously Formation ended some time after 10.6 m.y. as late Miocene or early Pleistocene but most ago. Younger deposits reflect the Colorado commonly Pliocene, records a transgression of River which, by 3.3 m.y. ago, was a well- the marine waters of the Gulf of California and incised stream flowing within 350 ft of its deposition of sediments very probably of present grade. Colorado River origin. These sediments contain Deposits and erosion surfaces on the Hualapai reworked Late Cretaceous foraminifers derived Plateau reflect drainage northeastward onto from the Mancos Shale of the Colorado the region of the present plateau from the Basin Plateau. Later sediments record a gradual and Range province until about 18 m.y. ago, change from marine to continental conditions. when the two provinces became separated In the Parker-Blythe-Cibola area, extend- topographically by movements along the ing along the Colorado River, the Bouse Grand Wash fault. No Colorado River existed Formation (Metzger, 1968), of Pliocene age, before the faulting. After faulting, drainage records a marine transgression in the form of an became interior. In none of the areas is there embayment of the Gulf of California. A evidence to suggest that the Colorado River possible northward decrease in salinity, evi- has departed appreciably from its present denced by faunas in the Bouse Formation, and course. a volume of sediments too large to be ac- This information leads to the following hy- counted for by local sources, suggest that a pothesis: until about 10.6 m.y. ago, or shortly large river emptied into the Bouse embayment thereafter, there was no Colorado River. After from the north. Although other streams and that date, waters of the Gulf of California in- washes may have contributed sediments to the vaded the Bouse embayment, and the ancestral embayment, it is probable that the main source Colorado River became established in the Lake was the ancestral Colorado River. The Bouse Mead area. The river emptied into the embay- Formation does not contain Mancos-type ment, which it progressively filled with its sedi- foraminifers but, in some surface exposures, ments from north to south. At this time, the does include Late Cretaceous coccoliths, head of the river had not yet reached areas probably of relatively local derivation. Depos- where the Mancos Shale cropped out (probably its younger than those of the Bouse Formation east of the Kaibab upwarp). As the sediment consist of Colorado River alluvium generally fill continued to build toward and into the unconformable on the Bouse, but locally con- Imperial Valley area, the headwaters of the formable. river breached the uplift and reached the In the Lake Mead area, deposits as young as Mancos Shale. The sediments then continued Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 83, p. 1933-1948, 3 figs., July 1972 1933 Downloaded from gsabulletin.gsapubs.org on January 23, 2013 1934 I. LUCCHITTA to build southward, rilling the head of the Gulf tions between the various areas, and points out of California, a process still going on. By 3.3 problems still unsolved. In addition, this in- m.y. ago, the river was a well-established formation supports a hypothesis that, though stream in the Lake Mead area, where it had highly tentative, can nevertheless provide a cut to within a few hundred feet of its present context for further research. This hypothesis is grade. controversial. I present it in the deliberate hope By this interpretation neither the Bouse that it will stimulate productive discussion of Formation nor the part of the Imperial Forma- the problem and perhaps bring out important tion containing Colorado River material is information not now generally available. This older than 10.6 m.y. If true, the Bouse Forma- paper does not attempt to be an exhaustive tion is in part older than and in part equivalent treatment of the subject, and many questions in time to the Imperial Formation. are touched on lightly or not at all. Some of these questions will be discussed in a paper INTRODUCTION being prepared by Lucchitta and Young. The origin, age, and history of the Colorado Others are treated in syntheses such as those River have long been of interest to geologists, of McKee and others (1967), and C. B. Hunt partly because unusual conditions must have (1969), which provide a broad perspective and existed to produce the Grand Canyon, and points of view in part alternative to that partly because great difficulties are encountered presented here. in explaining how the river could establish a The four areas considered in this report are course so independent of the major topographic (Fig. 1): Imperial Valley; Parker-Blythe- and structural features that lie across its path. Cibola area; Lake Mead area; and the Hualapai Probably the most impressive of these features, Plateau. Of these, I am personally acquainted and the one that raises most problems in un- with the last two, especially the Lake Mead derstanding the history of the river, is the area. Information for the other areas has been Kaibab upwarp, a structural and topographic obtained from the literature and from com- high trending approximately north, directly munication with geologists who have experi- athwart the general course of the river at the ence with these areas. eastern, or upstream, end of the Grand Canyon. Largely because of this, recent work IMPERIAL VALLEY AREA on the history of the Colorado River often This synthesis is made chiefly from the considers this upwarp as the dividing line be- papers of Allison (1964), Dibblee (1954), tween an upper and lower section of the Durham (1950), Durham and Allison (I960), Colorado River, and therefore tends to treat Merriam and Bandy (1965), and Muffler and the two sections individually, subsequently Doe (1968). Additional information is obtained attempting to tie them together across the from Smith (1970) and Bukry (1969, 1970, upwarp. written commun.). The scope of the present paper is restricted The Imperial Valley is in the Salton Trough, to the section of the Colorado downstream of a tectonic feature consisting of the northwest or the Kaibab upwarp, specifically from near the landward extension of the Gulf of California mouth of the Grand Canyon to about 100 mi structural depression. The valley is traversed upstream from the mouth of the river. Its at its southeastern end by the Colorado River, purpose is to summarize and tie together re- which in that area is about 100 mi upstream sults obtained by various geologists from key from its mouth. The highlands bordering the areas in this section. Although this part of the valley reach altitudes of 6,000 ft in the Penin- river is largely in the Basin and Range province, sular Range to the west. The San Andreas fault it has a profound influence on interpretations zone runs along the eastern margin of the valley of the history of the Grand Canyon and indeed (Fig- 1).
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