Eocene activity on the Western Sierra Fault System and its role incising Kings Canyon, California

Abstract

Combining new and published apatite (U–Th)/He and apatite ^4He/^3He data from along the Kings River canyon, California we rediscover a west-down normal fault on the western slope of the southern Sierra Nevada, one of a series of scarps initially described by Hake (1928) which we call the Western Sierra Fault System. Integrating field observations with apatite (U–Th)/He data, we infer a single fault trace 30 km long, and constrain the vertical offset across this fault to be roughly a kilometer. Thermal modeling of apatite ^4He/^3He data documents a pulse of footwall cooling near the fault and upstream in the footwall at circa 45–40 Ma, which we infer to be the timing of a kilometer-scale incision pulse resulting from the fault activity. In the context of published data from the subsurface of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, our data from the Western Sierra Fault System suggests an Eocene tectonic regime dominated by low-to-moderate magnitude extension, surface uplift, and internal structural deformation of the southern Sierra Nevada and proximal Great Valley forearc.