Western North America was a rapidly subsiding, passive continental margin during the Cambrian. During the Middle Cambrian, a belt of carbonate deposition dominated the central shelf. It was bounded by fine-grained terrigenous sediments that accumulated in deep water to the west and in shallow water to the east. Movement along a high-angle fault that extended across the shelf produced a conspicuous embayment into the carbonate belt in Nevada and Utah during the middle Middle Cambrian. This fault movement controlled basin geometry and distribution of carbonate and shale lithofacies on the shelf for at least the next 40 m.y.

The embayment was an asymmetrical trough that deepened and widened as it extended some 400 km westward toward the edge of the continent. South of its abrupt southern margin, which marked the position of the fault, shallow subtidal and peritidal sediments accumulated throughout the Middle Cambrian. The northern flank of the embayment was a drowned platform that sloped gently southward into the trough axis. On this ramp, a carbonate platform was rapidly reestablished through vertical accretion and progradation. In the trough axis, which lay near the faulted margin, sediments representing anoxic and deep-water environments accumulated throughout the middle and late Middle Cambrian. Sedimentation rates in this axial region were inadequate to reestablish a shallow-water depositional settin because of reactivation of faulting and because the trough acted as a sediment bypass zone.

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