Sedimentology and Thermal Mechanical History of Ba sins in the Central Appalachian Orogen: Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania to Wallops Island, Field Trip T152

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Field Trip Guidebooks Series, Volume 152.

This sedimentary basin workshop and field trip will examine the interplay between basin tectonics and sedimentary deposits in foreland, rift, and, to a lesser extent, passive margin basins of the well-studied central Appalachian orogen (Fig. 1). We will describe the tectonic characteristics of each basin type using thermal-mechanical models of the crust and then discuss the nature of their basin fills in that light. In this way we hope to better understand the relationships between tectonic characteristics--basin geometry, subsidence history, and relative topographic relief, for example--and basin-fill characteristics such as depositional environments and resulting lithofacies, isopach patterns, and on-or off-lap patterns.

The material presented here, limited by publication factors, is arguably the minimum necessary to accomplish these goals. Following these comments, a few paragraphs outline the geologic history of the Appalachian orogen. This is followed by a presentation of a foreland flexural model and its application to the Late Paleozoic foreland basin of the central Appalachians. A similar article presents a rift model and its application to the Mesozoic basins of eastern North America, and in particular, the Newark Basin. No passive margin model is presented as such; the important considerations are presented under the rift model. These are followed by the description of specific field localities in the central Appalachian region, chosen to illustrate the database upon which many of the arguments rest.