Laramide bulldozing of lithosphere beneath the Arizona transition zone, southwestern United States

Abstract

The northwest-trending transition zone (TZ) in Arizona (southwestern United States) is an ∼100-km-wide physiographic province that separates the relatively undeformed southwestern margin of the Colorado Plateau from the hyperextended Basin and Range province to the southwest. The TZ is widely depicted to have been a Late Cretaceous−Paleogene northeast-dipping erosional slope along which Proterozoic rocks were denuded but not significantly deformed. Our multi-method thermochronological study (biotite 40Ar/39Ar, zircon and apatite [U-Th-Sm]/He, and apatite fission track) of Proterozoic rocks in the Bradshaw Mountains of the west-central Arizona TZ reveals relatively rapid cooling (∼10 °C/m.y.) from temperatures of >180 °C to <60 °C between ca. 70 and ca. 50 Ma. Given minimal ca. 70−50 Ma upper-crustal shortening in the TZ, we attribute cooling to exhumation driven by northeastward bulldozing of continental lower crust and mantle lithosphere beneath it by the Farallon flat slab. Bulldozing is consistent with contemporaneous (ca. 70−50 Ma) underplating and initial exhumation of Orocopia Schist to the southwest in western Arizona and Mesozoic garnet-clinopyroxenite xenoliths of possible Mojave batholith keel affinity in ca. 25 Ma TZ volcanic rocks.