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The AAPG/Datapages Combined Publications Database

AAPG Bulletin

Abstract


Volume: 47 (1963)

Issue: 8. (August)

First Page: 1497

Last Page: 1526

Title: Post-Sauk and Pre-Absaroka Paleozoic Stratigraphic Patterns in North America

Author(s): Harry E. Wheeler (2)

Abstract:

The post-Sauk Paleozoic of United States and at least southern Canada, except incompletely interpreted late Paleozoic in the Cordilleran and Ouachita regions, comprises six major discontinuity-bounded sequences. In addition to two previously defined by Sloss et al., 1949, and Sloss, 1959 (Tippecanoe and modified Absaroka), four others include: two sequences separated by the Taconic discontinuity and confined to the eastern craton and Appalachian geosyncline, but together occupying the Tippecanoe interval; and two virtually transcontinental sequences, separated by the Acadian discontinuity, and together comprising approximate "Kaskaskia" interval of Sloss et al.

The discontinuities are: I, unnamed pre-Tippecanoe (pre-"Chazy-Black River"); II, Taconic, pre-Silurian (eastern America only); III, unnamed pre-"mid"-Devonian; IV, Acadian, pre-latest Devonian; and V, unnamed pre-Absaroka (about pre-Desmoines). I, II, and V have been widely recognized; III has been appreciated regionally in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains of northern United States and southern Canada (Harker et al., 1954, and Andrichuk, 1954), but otherwise previously envisaged rather locally; and IV, long recognized in Maritime Provinces and New England, and also shown from southern Appalachians to Oklahoma (King, 1955), but otherwise previously demonstrated in many widely scattered areas.

These sequences and their many interregional stratigraphic "constants," together with the intervening lacunas and their deformation-erosion differentials, demonstrate a striking historical episodicity which is unrelated to and obscured by the arbitrary time-stratigraphic subdivisions (systems, etc.) of the stratal record. Moreover, both physical and biostratigraphic patterns comprise a mutually harmonious and relatively simple order, which, by implication, tends to negate most of the previously envisaged "persistent" positive and negative intracratonic tectonic features.

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