Style, controls, and timing of fold-and-thrust deformation of the Jago stock, northeastern Brooks Range, Alaska

Abstract

Involvement of the Devonian Jago stock in Cenozoic fold-and-thrust deformation of the northeastern Brooks Range illustrates the influence of a relatively small, isolated crystalline body on the mechanical stratigraphy and subsequent deformational behavior of an otherwise layered sedimentary package. The small size of the stock allowed it and the structurally coupled overlying Mississippian Kekiktuk Conglomerate to deform nonpenetratively as a horse in a regional duplex, in contrast to the semiductile behavior of the nearby but much larger Okpilak batholith. Shear was localized in the upper part of the stock and the conglomerate due to partial detachment of the overlying Carboniferous Lisburne Group. North-vergent thrust-related folds formed in the mechanically layered Lisburne Group carbonates instead of the symmetrical, unfaulted detachment folds more typical of the region because an underlying regional detachment horizon in the Mississippian Kayak Shale is depositionally absent over the stock. Unusually competent contact-metamorphosed pre-Mississippian metasedimentary rocks were thrust over the stock and its cover because a ramp formed at the edge of the stock and cut upsection through the Lisburne Group due to the absence of Kayak Shale. A 40Ar/39Ar age of foliated white mica indicates thrusting of the stock by 61 Ma; fission-track ages indicate cooling at ~44 and ~28 Ma. These ages indicate a cooling history that implies ~11 km of unroofing since ~61 Ma, only ~1.5 km of which can be explained by the inferred duplex structure. The remaining ~9.5 km of unroofing is most likely due to subduplex structural thickening above a deep regional detachment.