Foreland Deformation Related to Precambrian Features of the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico

Abstract

Late Paleozoic assembly of the Pangean supercontinent in the western U.S. occurred as a result of a continental collision between North and South America. This deformational event, called the Appalachian-Ouachita-Marathon Orogeny, deformed a broad area of the western USA as a result of far-field, compressional reactivation of preexisting zones of weakness in the underlying continental crust. The pre-collisional forerunner to the Permian Basin, the Tobosa Basin, covered an area of 222,000 km² north of the suture between North and South America (in the area of the Marathon Fold-Thrust Belt). In this study, seismic data was used to examine the nature of the eastern and western bounding fault systems of the Central Basin Platform and to ascertain the influence of pre-existing zones of weakness installed by Late Proterozoic rifting and contraction of the Grenville Orogeny on Late Paleozoic uplift and subsidence. The connection between two scales of faulting, uplift and subsidence was explored: block-scale crustal thrusting along a high-angle Precambrian fault on the eastern boundary of the Central Basin Platform and the extensive field-scale left-lateral faulting that pervades the Central Basin Platform (as well as the Delaware Basin, possibly due to delamination). Permian Basin patterns of thrusting related to crustal shortening are analogous to aulacogen features of the Anadarko Basin.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90219 © 2015 GCAGS, Houston, Texas, September 20-22, 2015