Interactive property of large thrust sheets with footwall rocks—the Sub thrust interactive duplex hypothesis: A mechanism of dome formation in thrust sheets

Abstract

Recently acquired Appalachian Ultradeep Core Hole (ADCOH) Project site investigation seismic reflection data and geologic data from the Appalachians and several other orogenic belts suggest an important mutually interdependent relationship exists between emplacement of large crystalline thrust sheets and the deforming foreland rocks beneath. This relationship suggests isolated domes beneath crystalline thrust sheets may be produced by passive folding of the sheet as a result of formation of an antiformal stack duplex in the platform sedimentary sequence beneath. Suggestions that domes in crystalline thrust sheets formed by interference of late open folds is doubtlessly still valid in places, but the platform duplex mechanism is probably also valid to explain the late doming of many crystalline and other large thrust sheets. The dome beneath the Shooting Creek and Brasstown Bald windows in the ADCOH site region is imaged as an antiformal stack duplex at depth. The Tallulah Falls dome, Grandfather Mountain and Mountain City windows, and Smokies Foothills duplex in the site region and elsewhere in the southern Blue Ridge are all late isolated domes and all are probably or demonstrably underlain by antiformal stack duplexes beneath the Blue Ridge-Piedmont composite crystalline thrust sheet. The Assynt window and footwall duplex benath the Arnabol and Moine thrusts in Scotland, and the Engadine window in the Alps may be similar structures.