Did the San Gabriel Mountains once floor the Los Angeles basin : Evidence from a Late Cenozoic magmatic event
- San Diego State Univ., CA (United States). Dept. of Geological Sciences
- California State Polytechnic Univ., Pomona, CA (United States). Dept. of Geological Sciences
A series of Late Cenozoic dikes intrude the crystalline basement complex of the San Gabriel Mountains. The dikes range in composition from basalt to rhyolite. Rocks of andesite composition are dominant. Cross-cutting relationships consistently show that the less abundant, high-silica units were emplaced during two or more initial pulses of magmatic activity. This was followed by at least four additional pulses of increasingly quartz-poor magma. The nature of the contacts between the dikes and their host suggest that the dikes were emplaced during progressive unroofing of the San Gabriel Mountains basement complex. In the northeastern corner of the Los Angeles basin, units within the Glendora Volcanics (Shelton, 1955) share many compositional and spatial characteristics with the dikes in the San Gabriel Mountains. The dikes may have served as mid-crustal conduits which fed the overlying Glendora Volcanics during widespread magmatism that accompanied the extensional opening of the Los Angeles basin sphenochasm (Luyendyk, 1991; Wright, 1991). The authors believe that the crystalline basement complex now exposed in the San Gabriel Mountains once floored portions of the Los Angeles basin prior to Miocene extension and magmatism. They feel that unroofing was accomplished by low-angle normal faulting during the opening of the Los Angeles basin.
- OSTI ID:
- 5096507
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9305259-; CODEN: GAAPBC
- Journal Information:
- Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs; (United States), Vol. 25:5; Conference: 89. annual meeting of the Cordilleran Section and the 46th annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Section of the Geological Society of America (GSA), Reno, NV (United States), 19-21 May 1993; ISSN 0016-7592
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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