Inferred relation of Miocene Bealville Fanglomerate to Edison Fault, Caliente Canyon area, Kern County, California
The Bealville Fanglomerate is a very coarse, local, eastern torrential facies of the middle Tertiary marine sedimentary sequence of southern San Joaquin basin. This fanglomerate is exposed in lower Caliente Canyon east of Bakersfield. It is composed of unsorted boulder-size detritus of granitic rocks now exposed in the highlands on the east and south. The fanglomerate intertongues northwestward into the overlying Miocene fluvial Bena Gravel and probably partly into the underlying Oligocene-Miocene fluvial Walker Formation. In its eastern exposure, the Bealville Fanglomerate laps onto granitic basement. The Bealville Fanglomerate, as thick as 7000 ft (2200 m), dips southward into the north-dipping Edison fault. Pre-Tertiary granitic basement was elevated on the Edison fault to the south when the fault was contemporaneously active during the Miocene. Both the fanglomerate terrane north of the fault and the adjacent granitic basement terrane south of it are now eroded to low relief, so the fault is not expressed physiographically and is inactive. In contrast, the active White Wolf fault to the southeast is expressed by the northwest-facing escarpment slope of Bear Mountain. The Bealville Fanglomerate was deposited during the early and middle Miocene as coarse alluvial detritus on the western base of the rising Sierra Nevada uplift of granitic terrane. This southward-dipping fanglomerate is coarser and thicker than other formations deposited on the eastern margin of the San Joaquin basin. These conditions indicate that the fanglomerate was deposited rapidly on a southward-tilting block against a block of granitic basement being elevated on the Edison fault to the south, and it was derived from the adjacent granitic terrane to the east and from that elevated on the Edison fault to the south.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
- OSTI ID:
- 7152164
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-8604187-
- Journal Information:
- Am. Assoc. Pet. Geol., Bull.; (United States), Vol. 70:4; Conference: American Association of Petroleum Geologist Pacific Section convention, Bakersfield, CA, USA, 16 Apr 1986
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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