Tectonic setting and origin of the Black Warrior basin
- Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington, KY (United States). Dept. of Geological Sciences
The Black Warrior basin has a triangular outline that is framed by the Ouachita thrust belt on the southwest, the Appalachian thrust belt on the southeast, and the North American craton on the north. The stratigraphy of the Black Warrior basin includes two distinct parts: a Cambrian-Mississippian passive-margin carbonate-shelf succession, and a Mississippian-Pennsylvanian clastic succession, the lower (Mississippian) part of which grades northeastward into a carbonate-shelf facies. The provenance and dispersal system of the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian clastic deposits have been interpreted in four different ways, each of which has significantly different implications for origin of the basin: (1) Ouachita orogenic source and northeastward prograding; (2) Alabama Appalachian orogenic source and northwestward prograding; (3) Georgia-tennessee Appalachian orogenic source and westward prograding; and (4) cratonic source and southward prograding. Subsidence history determined from calculations of decompacted thickness indicates that (1) the Black Warrior basin is an orogenic foreland basin related primarily to the Ouachita thrust load on the southwest; (2) later emplacement of the Alabama Appalachian thrust belt modified the southeastern side of the Ouachita-related Black Warrior foreland basin; and (3) a separate foreland basin, representing the southern end of the Appalachian foreland basin, formed in response to the Georgia-Tennessee Appalachian thrust load. The previously used criteria do not necessarily support a unique interpretation, but synthesizing these data with subsidence history leads to the conclusion that the Black Warrior basin is a tectonically driven, orogenic foreland basin dominated by Ouachita thrusting and modified by Appalachian thrusting.
- OSTI ID:
- 6888154
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9404221-; CODEN: GAAPBC
- Journal Information:
- Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs; (United States), Vol. 26:4; Conference: 43. annual meeting of the Southeastern Section of the Geological Society of America, Blacksburg, VA (United States), 7-8 Apr 1994; ISSN 0016-7592
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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