Carboniferous sediment dispersal in the Appalachian–Ouachita juncture: Provenance of selected late Mississippian sandstones in the Black Warrior Basin, Mississippi, United States

Abstract

The Black Warrior Basin is one of several Carboniferous foreland basins along the Appalachian–Ouachita fold-thrust belt in the southeastern United States. Sediment dispersal within the Black Warrior Basin has been a long-debated topic because of a complex tectonic history and the potential interaction between the Appalachian and Ouachita orogenic belts, as well as far field sediment sources. Three dispersal patterns have been proposed, including dispersal routes from the craton, dispersal via the Appalachian foreland, and dispersal from the arc side of the Ouachita suture, but sediment dispersal in the Black Warrior Basin remains inconclusive. In this study, sandstone modal analysis and U–Pb detrital zircon geochronology are used to document the provenance and potential dispersal patterns for selected Mississippian sandstone units in the Black Warrior Basin, Missouri, USA. Results show that the majority of the Lewis, Evans, Sanders, and Carter sandstones are sublitharenite to mature quartzarenite and fall within the Cratonic Interior field on Q–F–L diagrams. U–Pb detrital zircon analyses of the Lewis, Sanders, and Carter sandstones show that there are four distinctive age clusters, including a prominent Paleozoic age cluster (~350–500Ma), a broad Grenville age cluster (~900–1350Ma), and two minor age clusters of the Granite–Rhyolite (~1360–1600Ma) and the Yavapai–Mazatzal (~1600–1800Ma) provinces. All Mississippian sandstones have similar age distributions except for the Lewis sandstone, which lacks zircon grains from the Superior province (>~2500Ma). Based on the compositional maturity, similarity of age distributions, and changes of relative abundance among different age groups, we conclude that the Late Mississippian sandstone units analyzed during this study were derived from the Laurussian craton and the northern part of the Appalachian foreland through a major axial drainage that occupied the Mississippi Valley Graben.