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J.E. Spencer

Publications and source records attributed to J.E. Spencer.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
USGS2010

The Paleogene California River: Evidence of Mojave-Uinta paleodrainage from U-Pb ages of detrital zircons

U-Pb age spectra of detrital zircons in samples from the Paleogene Colton Formation in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah and the Late Cretaceous McCoy Mountains Formation of southwestern Arizona (United States) are statistically indistinguishable. This finding refutes previous inferences that arkosic detritus of the Colton was derived from cratonic basement exposed by Laramide tectonism, and instead establishes the Cordilleran magmatic arc (which also provided sediment to the McCoy Mountains Formation) as the primary source. Given the existence of a north-south-trending drainage divide in eastern Nevada and the north-northeast direction of Laramide paleoflow throughout Arizona and southern Utah, we infer that a large river system headed in the arc of the Mojave region flowed northeast ~700 km to the Uinta Basin. Named after its source area, this Paleogene California River would have been equal in scale but opposite in direction to the modern Green River-Colorado River system, and the timing and causes of the subsequent drainage reversal are important constraints on the tectonic evolution of the Cordillera and the Colorado Plateau. ?? 2010 Geological Society of America.

Geology↗
USGS2010

Structural analysis of three extensional detachment faults with data from the 2000 Space-Shuttle Radar Topography Mission

The Space-Shuttle Radar Topography Mission provided geologists with a detailed digital elevation model of most of Earth's land surface. This new database is used here for structural analysis of grooved surfaces interpreted to be the exhumed footwalls of three active or recently active extensional detachment faults. Exhumed fault footwalls, each with an areal extent of one hundred to several hundred square kilometers, make up much of Dayman dome in eastern Papua New Guinea, the western Gurla Mandhata massif in the central Himalaya, and the northern Tokorondo Mountains in central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Footwall curvature in profile varies from planar to slightly convex upward at Gurla Mandhata to strongly convex upward at northwestern Dayman dome. Fault curvature decreases away from the trace of the bounding detachment fault in western Dayman dome and in the Tokorondo massif, suggesting footwall flattening (reduction in curvature) following exhumation. Grooves of highly variable wavelength and amplitude reveal extension direction, although structural processes of groove genesis may be diverse.

GSA Today↗
USGS2008

Middle to late cenozoic geology, hydrography, and fish evolution in the American Southwest

An evaluation of the poorly understood Cenozoic hydrologic history of the American Southwest using combined geological and biological data yields new insights with implications for tectonic evolution. The Mesozoic Cordilleran orogen next to the continental margin of southwestern North America probably formed the continental divide. Mountain building migrated eastward to cause uplift of the Rocky Mountains during the Late Cretaceous to early Tertiary Laramide orogeny. Closed drainage basins that developed between the two mountain belts trapped lake waters containing fish of Atlantic affinity. Oligocene-Miocene tectonic extension fragmented the western mountain belt and created abundant closed basins that gradually filled with sediments and became conduits for dispersal of fishes of both Pacific and Atlantic affinity. Abrupt arrival of the modern Colorado River to the Mojave-Sonora Desert region at ca. 5 Ma provided a new conduit for fish dispersal. Great dissimilarities in modern fish fauna, including differences in their mitochondrial deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), indicate that late Miocene runoff from the Colorado Plateau did not flow down the Platte or Rio Grande, or through the Lake Bonneville Basin. Fossil fishes from the upper Miocene part of the Bidahochi Formation on the Colorado Plateau have characteristics that reflect a habitat of large, swift-moving waters, and they are closely related to fossil fishes associated with the Snake and Sacramento Rivers. This evidence suggests that influx of fishes from the ancestral Snake River involved a major drainage, not merely small headwater transfers. ?? 2008 The Geological Society of America.

Conference Paper↗
USGS2008

An evaluation of the evolution of the latest miocene to earliest pliocene bouse lake system in the lower Colorado river valley, southwestern USA

The upper Miocene to lower Pliocene Bouse Formation in the lower Colorado River trough of the American Southwest was deposited in three basins - from north to south, the Mohave, Havasu, and Blythe Basins - that were formed by extensional fault ing in the early to middle Miocene. Fossils of marine, brackish, and freshwater organ isms in the Bouse Formation have been interpreted to indicate an estuarine environment associated with early opening of the nearby Gulf of California. Regional uplift since 5 Ma is required to position the estuarine Bouse Formation at present elevations as high as 555 m, where greater uplift is required in the north. We present a compilation of Bouse Formation elevations that is consistent with Bouse deposition in lakes, with an abrupt 225 m northward increase in maximum Bouse elevations at Topock gorge north of Lake Havasu. Within Blythe and Havasu Basins, maximum Bouse elevations are 330 m above sea level in three widely spaced areas and reveal no evidence of regional tilting. To the north in Mohave Basin, numerous Bouse outcrops above 480 m elevation include three widely spaced sites where the Bouse Formation is exposed at 536-555 m. Numerical simulations of initial Colorado River inflow to a sequence of closed basins along the lower Colorado River corridor model a history of lake filling, spilling, evaporation and salt concentration, and outflow-channel incision. The simulations support the plausibility of evaporative concentration of Colorado River water to seawater-level salinities in Blythe Basin and indicate that such salinities could have remained stable for as long as 20-30 k.y. We infer that fossil marine organ isms in the Bouse Formation, restricted to the southern (Blythe) basin, reflect coloniza tion of a salty lake by a small number of species that were transported by birds.

Conference Paper↗
USGS2001

Possible giant metamorphic core complex at the center of Artemis Corona, Venus

Hundreds of circular features on Venus known as coronae are characterized by annular fractures and commonly associated radial fractures and lava flows. Coronae are thought to have been produced by buoyant mantle diapirs that flatten and spread at the base of the lithosphere and cause fracturing, uplift, and magmatism. The interior of Artemis Corona, by far the largest corona at 2100 km diameter, is divided in half by a northeast-trending deformation belt that contains numerous rounded ridges resembling antiforms. The largest of these ridges, located at the center of Artemis Corona, is ∼5 km high on its steep northwest flank where it is adjacent to a flat-bottomed, 10-km-wide trough interpreted as a rift valley. The 280-km-long antiformal ridge is marked by perpendicular grooves that cross the ∼50-km-wide ridge and extend southeastward as far as 120 km across adjacent plains. The grooves abruptly terminate northwestward at the rift trough. The large antiformal ridge terminates southwestward at a transform shear zone that parallels the grooves. These features—rift valley, antiformal uplift, grooves, and transform shear zone—are morphologically and geometrically similar to grooved, elevated, submarine metamorphic core complexes on the inside corners of ridge-transform intersections of slow-spreading ridges on Earth. As with submarine core complexes, the grooved surface on Venus is interpreted as the footwall of a large-displacement normal fault, and the grooves are inferred to be the product of plastic molding of the footwall to irregularities on the underside of the hanging wall followed by tectonic exhumation of the molded grooves and conveyer-belt–like transport up and over the large antiform and across the southeastern plains. According to this interpretation, the trend of the grooves records the direction of extension, which is perpendicular to the thrusts at the leading edge of the annular thrust belt 1000 km to the southeast. Both may have formed at the same time as a result of uniform southeastward displacement of the southeastern half of the interior of Artemis Corona. The location of this grooved core complex at the center of Artemis Corona may reflect genesis above the buoyant, ascending tail of the corona-producing mantle diapir.

Geological Society of America Bulletin↗
USGS2000

Possible origin and significance of extension-parallel drainages in Arizona's metamophic core complexes

The corrugated form of the Harcuvar, South Mountains, and Catalina metamorphic core complexes in Arizona reflects the shape of the middle Tertiary extensional detachment fault that projects over each complex. Corrugation axes are approximately parallel to the fault-displacement direction and to the footwall mylonitic lineation. The core complexes are locally incised by enigmatic, linear drainages that parallel corrugation axes and the inferred extension direction and are especially conspicuous on the crests of antiformal corrugations. These drainages have been attributed to erosional incision on a freshly denuded, planar, inclined fault ramp followed by folding that elevated and preserved some drainages on the crests of rising antiforms. According to this hypothesis, corrugations were produced by folding after subacrial exposure of detachment-fault foot-walls. An alternative hypothesis, proposed here, is as follows. In a setting where preexisting drainages cross an active normal fault, each fault-slip event will cut each drainage into two segments separated by a freshly denuded fault ramp. The upper and lower drainage segments will remain hydraulically linked after each fault-slip event if the drainage in the hanging-wall block is incised, even if the stream is on the flank of an antiformal corrugation and there is a large component of strike-slip fault movement. Maintenance of hydraulic linkage during sequential fault-slip events will guide the lengthening stream down the fault ramp as the ramp is uncovered, and stream incision will form a progressively lengthening, extension-parallel, linear drainage segment. This mechanism for linear drainage genesis is compatible with corrugations as original irregularities of the detachment fault, and does not require folding after early to middle Miocene footwall exhumations. This is desirable because many drainages are incised into nonmylonitic crystalline footwall rocks that were probably not folded under low-temperature, surface conditions. An alternative hypothesis, that drainages were localized by small fault grooves as footwalls were uncovered, is not supported by analysis of a down-plunge fault projection for the southern Rincon Mountains that shows a linear drainage aligned with the crest of a small antiformal groove on the detachment fault, but this process could have been effective elsewhere. Lineation-parallel drainages now plunge gently southwestward on the southwest ends of antiformal corrugations in the South and Buckskin Mountains, but these drainages must have originally plunged northeastward if they formed by either of the two alternative processes proposed here. Footwall exhumation and incision by northeast-flowing streams was apparently followed by core-complex arching and drainage reversal.

Arizona↗
USGS1999

Geologic continuous casting below continental and deep-sea detachment faults and at the striated extrusion of Sacsayhuaman, Peru

In one common type of industrial continuous casting, partially molten metal is extruded from a vessel through a shaped orifice called a mold in which the metal assumes the cross-sectional form of the mold as it cools and solidifies. Continuous casting can be sustained as long as molten metal is supplied and thermal conditions are maintained. I propose that a similar process produced parallel sets of grooves in three geologic settings, as follows: (1) corrugated metamorphic core complexes where mylonitized mid-crustal rocks were exhumed by movement along low-angle normal faults known as detachment faults; (2) corrugated submarine surfaces where ultramafic and mafic rocks were exhumed by normal faulting within oceanic spreading centers; and (3) striated magma extrusions exemplified by the famous grooved outcrops at the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuamán in Peru. In each case, rocks inferred to have overlain the corrugated surface during corrugation genesis molded and shaped a plastic to partially molten rock mass as it was extruded from a moderate- to high-temperature reservoir.

Geology↗
USGS1997

Sr isotope evidence for a lacustrine origin for the upper Miocene to Pliocene Bouse Formation, lower Colorado River trough, and implications for timing of Colorado Plateau uplift

The upper Miocene to Pliocene Bouse Formation in the lower Colorado River trough, which consists largely of siltstone with basal tufa and marl, has been interpreted as estuarine on the basis of paleontology. This interpretation requires abrupt marine inundation that has been linked to early rifting in the Gulf of California and Salton trough. New strontium isotope measurements reported here from carbonates and invertebrate shells in the Bouse Formation reveal no evidence of marine water, but are consistent with deposition in a lake or chain of lakes fed by the Colorado River. Furthermore, the absence of a southward decrease in 87 Sr/ 86 Sr within the Bouse Formation does not support the estuarine model in which low 87 Sr/ 86 Sr marine Sr would have dominated the mouth of the hypothetical Bouse estuary. Elevation of originally marine 87 Sr/ 86 Sr in the Bouse Formation to its present level, due to postdepositional interaction with ground water, is unlikely because Sr from secondary calcite above, below, and within the Bouse Formation is consistently less radiogenic, not more, than Bouse marl and shells. In contrast to Bouse Sr, strontium from mollusks in tidal-flat and delta-front paleoenvironments in the contemporaneous Imperial Formation in the Salton trough and from the subsurface south of Yuma was derived from sea water and confirms the dominance of marine strontium near or at the mouth of the late Miocene to early Pliocene Colorado River. Inferred post–early Pliocene uplift of the Bouse Formation from below sea level to modern elevations of up to 550 m has been used to support a late Cenozoic uplift age for the nearby Colorado Plateau. This constraint on uplift timing is eliminated if the Bouse Formation is lacustrine.

Geological Society of America Bulletin↗
USGS1996

Uplift of the Colorado Plateau due to lithosphere attenuation during Laramide low-angle subduction

The Colorado Plateau is blanketed by Phanerozoic marine and nonmarine strata as young as Cretaceous that are now exposed at elevations of about 2 km. Crustal thickening due to magmatism and horizontal crustal shortening was far less than necessary to cause this uplift, which is commonly attributed to the consequences of mantle lithosphere thinning and heating. The Colorado Plateau and the midcontinent region around Iowa consist of Precambrian bedrock overlain by a similar amount of Paleozoic platformal strata, and thus both regions once had similar lithospheric buoyancy. Mesozoic sedimentation increased the crustal thickness and lithospheric buoyancy of the Colorado Plateau relative to the midcontinent region. Backstripping calculations yield elevation without these sediments and lead to a calculated elevation difference between the two areas of about 1200 m, which represents unexplained plateau uplift. Review of constraints on uplift timing finds little support for a late Cenozoic uplift age and allows early to middle Cenozoic uplift, which is consistent with uplift mechanisms related to low-angle subduction that ended in the middle Cenozoic. Finite element heat flow calculations of low-angle subduction and lithosphere attenuation, using a range of initial lithosphere thicknesses and degree of attenuation, indicate that required uplift can result from tectonic removal of about 120 km of mantle lithosphere from an initially 200-km-thick lithosphere. This allows for partial preservation of North American mantle lithosphere with its distinctive isotopic signature in some late Cenozoic volcanic rocks and is consistent with normal Pn velocities in the uppermost mantle beneath the plateau.

Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth↗