Liu, Lijun and Gurnis, Michael and Seton, Maria and Saleeby, Jason and Müller, R. Dietmar and Jackson, Jennifer M. (2010) The role of oceanic plateau subduction in the Laramide orogeny. Nature Geoscience, 3 (5). pp. 353-357. ISSN 1752-0894. doi:10.1038/NGEO829. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20100526-100500524
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Abstract
The cause of the Laramide phase of mountain building remains uncertain. Conceptual models implicate the subduction of either ocean ridges or conjugates of the buoyant Hess or Shatsky oceanic plateaux. Independent verification of these models has remained elusive, because the putative ridges or plateaux are no longer at the Earth’s surface. Inverse convection models have identified two prominent seismic anomalies on the recovered Farallon plate. Here we combine inverse convection models with reconstructions of plate motions, to show that these seismic anomalies coincide palaeogeographically with the restored positions of the Shatsky and Hess conjugate plateaux as they subducted beneath North America. Specifically, the distribution of Laramide crustal shortening events tracked the passage of the Shatsky conjugate beneath North America, whereas the effects of the Hess conjugate subduction were restricted to the northern Mexico foreland belt. We propose that continued subduction caused the oceanic crust to undergo the basalt–eclogite phase transformation, during which the Shatsky conjugate lost its extra buoyancy and was effectively removed. Increases in slab density and coupling between the overriding and subducting plates initially dragged the surface downward, followed by regional-scale surface rebound. We conclude that Laramide uplift resulted from the removal, rather than emplacement, of the Shatsky conjugate.
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Additional Information: | © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. Received 25 August 2009; accepted 26 February 2010; published online 28 March 2010. We thank D. Helmberger, D. Anderson, P. DeCelles and K. Karlstrom for helpful discussions and P. DeCelles for a helpful review. This represents Contribution number 10026 of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences and 102 of the Tectonics Observatory, Caltech. At Caltech this work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (EAR-0739071 and EAR-0810303) and through the Tectonics Observatory by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Author contributions: L.L. and M.G. designed the whole workflow and carried out the inverse convection model, M.S. and R.D.M. carried out the plate reconstruction, J.S. worked on the geological interpretation and J.M.J. provided mineral physics analysis. All authors participated in preparing the paper. | ||||||||||
Group: | Caltech Tectonics Observatory, Seismological Laboratory | ||||||||||
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Subject Keywords: | Structural geology: tectonics and geodynamics; volcanology: mineralogy and petrology | ||||||||||
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Issue or Number: | 5 | ||||||||||
DOI: | 10.1038/NGEO829 | ||||||||||
Record Number: | CaltechAUTHORS:20100526-100500524 | ||||||||||
Persistent URL: | https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20100526-100500524 | ||||||||||
Usage Policy: | No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided. | ||||||||||
ID Code: | 18451 | ||||||||||
Collection: | CaltechAUTHORS | ||||||||||
Deposited By: | Tony Diaz | ||||||||||
Deposited On: | 20 Jun 2010 19:15 | ||||||||||
Last Modified: | 08 Nov 2021 23:44 |
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