Summary: A few days ago we talked about the Laramide Orogeny, the brittle breaking of the continental crust into huge uplifts along relatively high-angle faults with miles and miles of throw. And I mentioned a different style of mountain building that took place partially at the same time and in some areas, in the same places. That aspect of the deformation is called the Sevier Orogeny – and again that’s not “severe” but “Sevier,” from a place in Utah. Just to keep things confusing. Sevier vs Laramide (source) The basic difference between the Sevier part of the activity and the Laramide part is that instead of those big brittle breaks in the crust, in the Sevier we had much thinner slices of rock – mostly the bedded sedimentary rock – being pushed over each other in generally low-angle thrust faults with often only a few thousand feet of displacement, but sometimes more. This is the fairly typical result of collisions. Think of a short pile of carpets and sheets and bedspreads all nicely on top of each other in horizontal layers. That’s the sedimentary package of rocks in western North America, ranging in age from Precambrian to the early Cretaceous. There’s been some bumping and breaking and so on, but on the whole, those carpets and sheets are still more or less intact and relatively horizontal. Now set a file cabinet on one side of the pile, and start pushing. The fabrics will fold and push up and over each other. In the real world of rocks, they are brittle enough to eventually break and slide over each other, and those breaks are called thrust faults. But the floor, the crystalline granitic rocks underneath the sediments, does not break. Well, it did in the Laramide Orogeny that we talked about the other day. But not in this more straightforward pushing we had during the Sevier Orogeny. In the real world, as the rocks that are the equivalent of our carpets and sheets piled up on top of each other, two things happened. First, the tops start eroding, with the eroded sediments shedding off to the east of the uplifted, thrusted mountains. And second, the weight of the thrust sheets, plus the sediment, was enough to bow down the crystalline granitic floor. Not really enough to break it, but to make it sag. We’ve just created a classic foreland basin. The foreland is the territory toward the craton, in this case the North American continent, inboard from the mountains created by the collision off to the west. The deepest part was in the west closest to the collision zone, where the thrust sheets and sediment piles were thickest, then it gets shallower and shallower, really pretty quickly, as you head east onto the strong craton. We can see the evidence for this in changes in sedimentation from west to east. Here in Montana, where I live, along the Big Hole River, the Kootenai Formation of early Cretaceous age is something like 3,000 feet thick. Just 50 miles to the east, the Kootenai is about 400 feet thick. That change in thickness reflects the bottom falling out – the crust subsiding – in the western part of the foreland basin. To an extent it’s a self-perpetuating event: as more and more sediment and thrust sheets come in, the crust bows down more and more, allowing for more and more sediment to pile into the basin. Eventually, of course, it slows down or stops, once the collision has stopped and the mountains have been eroded to a level where they don’t contribute sediments in huge volume any more. One important difference between the Laramide style and the Sevier style of mountain building is that the Laramide was pretty much a case of brittle breaking. The crust is thick, relatively uniform, and brittle, so it tends to break rather than bend. The sedimentary pile, on the other hand, was a package of diverse rocks that overall was a bit more plastic, and could fold before it broke. In detail, of course, there are brittle units and more plastic units – sandstones and limestones tend to be stronger and more brittle, and shales tend
