Pacific–North America plate motion and opening of the Upper Delfín basin, northern Gulf of California, Mexico

2003 ◽  
Vol 115 (10) ◽  
pp. 1173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Oskin ◽  
Joann Stock
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Gulf Of California ◽  
Plate Motion

Rapid localization of Pacific–North America plate motion in the Gulf of California

Geology ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Oskin ◽  
Joann Stock ◽  
Arturo Martín-Barajas
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Gulf Of California ◽  
Plate Motion

scholarly journals Tectonostratigraphic record of late Miocene–early Pliocene transtensional faulting in the Eastern California shear zone, southwestern USA

Geosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Dorsey ◽  
Brennan O’Connell ◽  
Kevin K. Gardner ◽  
Mindy B. Homan ◽  
Scott E.K. Bennett ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Shear Zone ◽  
Gulf Of California ◽  
Colorado River ◽  
Normal Fault ◽  
River Valley ◽  
Plate Motion ◽  
Fault System ◽  
Eastern California Shear Zone ◽  
Southwestern Usa

The Eastern California shear zone (ECSZ; southwestern USA) accommodates ~20%–25% of Pacific–North America relative plate motion east of the San Andreas fault, yet little is known about its early tectonic evolution. This paper presents a detailed stratigraphic and structural analysis of the uppermost Miocene to lower Pliocene Bouse Formation in the southern Blythe Basin, lower Colorado River valley, where gently dipping and faulted strata provide a record of deformation in the paleo-ECSZ. In the western Trigo Mountains, splaying strands of the Lost Trigo fault zone include a west-dipping normal fault that cuts the Bouse Formation and a steeply NE-dipping oblique dextral-normal fault where an anomalously thick (~140 m) section of Bouse Formation siliciclastic deposits filled a local fault-controlled depocenter. Systematic basinward thickening and stratal wedge geometries in the western Trigo and southeastern Palo Verde Mountains, on opposite sides of the Colorado River valley, record basinward tilting during deposition of the Bouse Formation. We conclude that the southern Blythe Basin formed as a broad transtensional sag basin in a diffuse releasing stepover between the dextral Laguna fault system in the south and the Cibola and Big Maria fault zones in the north. A palinspastic reconstruction at 5 Ma shows that the southern Blythe Basin was part of a diffuse regional network of linked right-step­ping dextral, normal, and oblique-slip faults related to Pacific–North America plate boundary dextral shear. Diffuse transtensional strain linked northward to the Stateline fault system, eastern Garlock fault, and Walker Lane, and southward to the Gulf of California shear zone, which initiated ca. 7–9 Ma, implying a similar age of inception for the paleo-ECSZ.

scholarly journals GPS geodetic constraints on Caribbean-North America Plate Motion

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles DeMets ◽  
Pamela E. Jansma ◽  
Glen S. Mattioli ◽  
Timothy H. Dixon ◽  
Fred Farina ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Plate Motion

scholarly journals Extreme Quaternary plate boundary exhumation and strike slip localized along the southern Fairweather fault, Alaska, USA

Geology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 602-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard O. Lease ◽  
Peter J. Haeussler ◽  
Robert C. Witter ◽  
Daniel F. Stockli ◽  
Adrian M. Bender ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Sedimentary Cover ◽  
Plate Boundary ◽  
Slip Rate ◽  
Strike Slip ◽  
Plate Motion ◽  
The North ◽  
Exhumation Rates ◽  
Restraining Bend

Abstract The Fairweather fault (southeastern Alaska, USA) is Earth’s fastest-slipping intracontinental strike-slip fault, but its long-term role in localizing Yakutat–(Pacific–)North America plate motion is poorly constrained. This plate boundary fault transitions northward from pure strike slip to transpression where it comes onshore and undergoes a <25°, 30-km-long restraining double bend. To the east, apatite (U-Th)/He (AHe) ages indicate that North America exhumation rates increase stepwise from ∼0.7 to 1.7 km/m.y. across the bend. In contrast, to the west, AHe age-depth data indicate that extremely rapid 5–10 km/m.y. Yakutat exhumation rates are localized within the bend. Further northwest, Yakutat AHe and zircon (U-Th)/He (ZHe) ages gradually increase from 0.3 to 2.6 Ma over 150 km and depict an interval of extremely rapid >6–8 km/m.y. exhumation rates that increases in age away from the bend. We interpret this migration of rapid, transient exhumation to reflect prolonged advection of the Cenozoic–Cretaceous sedimentary cover of the eastern Yakutat microplate through a stationary restraining bend along the edge of the North America plate. Yakutat cooling ages imply a long-term strike-slip rate (54 ± 6 km/m.y.) that mimics the millennial (53 ± 5 m/k.y.) and decadal (46 mm/yr) rates. Fairweather fault slip can account for all Pacific–North America relative plate motion throughout Quaternary time and indicates stability of highly localized plate boundary strike slip on a single fault where extreme rock uplift rates are persistently localized within a restraining bend.

Land Birds

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin L. Cody ◽  
Enriqueta Velarde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Gulf Of California ◽  
Field Work ◽  
New Subspecies ◽  
Island Populations ◽  
Species Lists ◽  
Desert Regions ◽  
Arid Desert

Very few of the early scientific explorers in the Gulf of California had much to say about the land birds. There might be two reasons for this: first, the land birds in arid, desert regions are sparse and in general unbecoming, and second, the species encountered are by and large those seen in the much more accessible regions of southwestern North America. Chapter 1 introduced János Xántus, who is recognized as the pioneer ornithologist (or at least bird collector) in the cape area of Lower California, whose contributions (e.g., 1859, in which the first description of the Gray Thrasher, Toxostoma cinereum, was published) are appropriately commemorated in the Xantus Hummingbird, the most spectacular endemic on the peninsula. Lawrence (1860) first described the species as Amazilia xantusi (thence Hylocharis xantusii, and now Basilinna xantusii), and P. L. Sclater announced the discovery to Ibis readers in the same year. By the end of the nineteenth century, several ornithologists had collected in the southern peninsula and reported their findings (e.g., Baird 1870; Belding 1883; Bryant 1889; Ridgway 1896), but very little of this work referred to the islands in the gulf. Brewster’s (1902) report on the cape region avifauna was the most comprehensive of the earlier studies. Serious attention was first paid to the gulf island birds by Maillard (1923) and Townsend (1923), and the latter’s 1911 island-hopping trip in the Albatross served as a model for many similar expeditions later. The first distributional synthesis of their work, and especially that of Nelson (1921), Lamb (e.g., 1924), and Thayer (e.g., 1907), was published by Joseph Grinnell in 1928 in a monograph that is still the standard reference for the peninsula and gulf area. The last 50 years have seen little progress beyond the accumulation of further distributional records and the description of new subspecies (e.g., van Rossem 1929, 1932; Banks 1963a,b,c, 1964, 1969). The island birds remain rather poorly known; even species lists are likely to be incomplete, and ecological studies of the island populations have scarcely begun. In this chapter we report on the results largely of our own field work.

North America I: The Southwest and the Southern Plains

Horse Nations ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
North America ◽  
Gulf Of California ◽  
Southern Plains ◽  
Sierra Madre ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Village Communities ◽  
The American South ◽  
Key Aspects

Ruled from Mexico City for about a century longer than they have thus far been from Washington, New Mexico and Arizona lie in what English speakers generally term ‘the Southwest’. I follow that usage here, even though calling them the ‘Northwest’ (of first colonial New Spain and then an independent Mexico) would, for this chapter’s purposes, be more accurate, as well as emphasizing that the cultural area to which their Indigenous inhabitants belonged extended across modern Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa, and Sonora. Together with the Southern Plains, to which trade links intimately tied it before and after Spanish arrival, the Southwest constituted the cradle within which the first Horse Nations of North America took shape. I start by highlighting key aspects of the two regions’ ecologies and prehistories. Next, I look at the horse’s impact on the Southwest’s settled farming peoples, particularly the Pueblos, many of whom came under Spanish rule after 1598. Its take-up by their Athapaskan-speaking neighbours, the Apache and Navajo, gives us our first view of how more mobile societies understood and used the horse, including—in the Navajo case—the development of a distinctive pastoralist way of life. Attention then turns to the Comanche, another pivotal player in the horse’s expansion across western North America, for whom it altered not just how they secured food, but also their social organization and entire economy. Trade—especially trade in horses—was critical in this, and so I end by examining the horse’s arrival among some of the Comanches’ trade partners, the village communities of the eastern edge of the Southern Plains, an area to which Native farmers-with-horses from the American South moved, and were forced to move, in the early 1800s. The Southwest is one of the driest parts of North America (Plate 4). Its climate is also strongly seasonal, with cold winters and hot summers. Major drainages are few: the Colorado in the west and northwest, southern Arizona’s Gila, the Río Grande, which snakes south through New Mexico and then along the present Texas/Mexico border, and the rivers draining into the Gulf of California from Mexico’s rugged Sierra Madre Occidental.

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