Intra-oceanic subduction shaped the assembly of Cordilleran North America

Karin Sigloch () and Mitchell G. Mihalynuk ()
Additional contact information
Karin Sigloch: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Theresienstrasse 41, 80333 Munich, Germany
Mitchell G. Mihalynuk: British Columbia Geological Survey, PO Box 9333 Stn Prov Govt, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 9N3, Canada

Nature, 2013, vol. 496, issue 7443, 50-56

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12019 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:496:y:2013:i:7443:d:10.1038_nature12019

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature12019

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().