Mantle and geological evidence for a Late Jurassic – Cretaceous suture spanning North America

Crustal blocks accreted to North America form two major belts which are separated by a tract of collapsed Jura-Cretaceous basins extending from Alaska to Mexico. Evidence of oceanic lithosphere that once underlay these basins is rare at the earth’s surface. Most of the lithosphere was subducted, which accounts for the general difficulty of reconstructing oceanic regions from surface evidence. However, this seafloor was not destroyed; it remains in the mantle beneath North America and is visible to seismic tomography, revealing configurations of arc-trench positions back to the breakup of Pangea. The double uncertainty of where trenches ran and how subducting lithosphere deformed while sinking in the mantle is surmountable, owing to the presence of a special-case slab geometry. Wall-like, linear slab belts exceeding 10,000 km in length appear to trace out intra-oceanic subduction zones that were stationary over tens of millions of years, and beneath which lithosphere sank almost vertically. This hypothesis sets up an absolute lower-mantle reference frame. Combined with a complete Atlantic spreading record that paleo-positions North America in this reference frame, the slab geometries permit detailed predictions of where and when ocean basins at the leading edge of westward-drifting North America were subducted, how intra-oceanic subduction zones were overridden, and how their associated arcs and basement terranes were sutured to the continent. An unconventional paleogeography is predicted in which mid- to late Mesozoic arcs grew in a long-lived archipelago located 2000-4000 km west of Pangean North America (while also consistent with the conventional view of a continental arc in early Mesozoic times). The Farallon Ocean subducted beneath the outboard (western) edge of the archipelago, whereas North America converged on the archipelago by westward subduction of an intervening, major ocean, the Mezcalera-Angayucham Oceans. The most conspicuous geologic prediction is that of an oceanic suture which must run along the entire western margin of North America. It formed diachronously between ~155 Ma and ~50 Ma, analogous to diachronous suturing of southwest Pacific arcs to the northward migrating Australian continent today. We proceed to demonstrate that this suture prediction fits the spatiotemporal evidence for the collapse of at least 11 Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous basins wedged between the Intermontane and Insular-Guerrero superterranes, about half of which are known to contain mantle rocks. These relative late suturing ages run counter to the Middle Jurassic or older timing required and asserted by the prevailing, Andean-analogue model for the North American Cordillera. We show that the arguments against late suturing are controvertible, and we present multiple lines of direct evidence for late suturing, consistent with geophysical observations. We refer to our close integration of surface and subsurface evidence from geology and geophysics as “tomotectonic analysis”. It provides a stringent test for currently accepted tectonic models and offers a blueprint for similar, continental-scale investigations in other accretionary orogens.</p

Comment on GSA Today article by Pavlis et al., 2019: “Subduction Polarity in Ancient Arcs: A Call to Integrate Geology and Geophysics to Decipher the Mesozoic Tectonic History of the Northern Cordillera of North America”

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Intra-oceanic subduction shaped the assembly of Cordilleran North America

The western quarter of North America consists of accreted terranes—crustal blocks added over the past 200 million years—but the reason for this is unclear. The widely accepted explanation posits that the oceanic Farallon plate acted as a conveyor belt, sweeping terranes into the continental margin while subducting under it. Here we show that this hypothesis, which fails to explain many terrane complexities, is also inconsistent with new tomographic images of lower-mantle slabs, and with their locations relative to plate reconstructions. We offer a reinterpretation of North American palaeogeography and test it quantitatively: collision events are clearly recorded by slab geometry, and can be time calibrated and reconciled with plate reconstructions and surface geology. The seas west of Cretaceous North America must have resembled today’s western Pacific, strung with island arcs. All proto-Pacific plates initially subducted into almost stationary, intra-oceanic trenches, and accumulated below as massive vertical slab walls. Above the slabs, long-lived volcanic archipelagos and subduction complexes grew. Crustal accretion occurred when North America overrode the archipelagos, causing major episodes of Cordilleran mountain building. </p

A quantitative tomotectonic plate reconstruction of Western North America and the Eastern Pacific Basin

Plate reconstructions since the breakup of Pangaea are mostly based on the preserved spreading history of ocean basins, within absolute reference frames that are constrained by a combination of age‐progressive hotspot tracks and palaeomagnetic data. The evolution of destructive plate margins is difficult to constrain from surface observations as much of the evidence has been subducted. Seismic tomography can directly constrain palaeo‐trench locations by imaging subducted lithosphere in the mantle. This new evidence, combined with the geological surface record of subduction, suggests that several intra‐oceanic arcs existed between the Farallon Ocean and North America during late Mesozoic times – in contrast to existing quantitative models that typically show long‐lived subduction of the Farallon plate beneath the continental margin. We present a continuously closing plate model for the eastern Pacific basin from 170 Ma to present, constrained using ‘tomotectonic analysis’ – the integration of surface and subsurface data. During the Middle to Late Jurassic, we show simultaneous eastward and westward subduction of oceanic plates under an archipelago composed of Cordilleran arc terranes. As North America drifts westward, it diachronously overrides the archipelago and its arcs, beginning in the latest Jurassic. During and post‐accretion, Cordilleran terranes are translated thousands of kilometers along the continental margin, as constrained by palaeomagnetic evidence. Final accretions to North America occur during the Eocene, ending ~100 million years of archipelago override. This model provides a detailed, quantitative tectonic history for the eastern Pacific domain, paving the way for tomotectonic analysis to be used in other palaeo‐oceanic regions