Thick-skinned deformation of the Archean Wyoming province during Proterozoic arc-continent collision

Abstract

Two major mylonite zones are exposed in the southeastern Archean Wyoming province: the Cheyenne belt, which marks the boundary between the Wyoming and Colorado provinces, and the Laramie Peak shear zone, across which Archean rocks have been uplifted differentially at least 10 km. Between the two mylonite zones is a 60-100-km-wide belt of Archean migmatitic gneiss, which has been intruded by diabase dikes and peridotites and contains enclaves of high-grade metasedimentary rocks. We interpret this belt of high-grade rocks as a tectonically reactivated block of Archean crust, uplifted during the development of the Cheyenne belt collisional zone at ca. 1.8 Ga. This block does not exhibit a decreasing metamorphic gradient away from the mylonite zone, but is at uniformly high grade. Thus, rather than a thick-skinned thrust-ramp model for uplift, we invoke vertical uplift along a high-angle reverse fault without rotation. This style of uplift may be a tectonic response to transpression, underplating, or tectonic interfingering at depth during collisional orogeny, and it may be a more common feature of basement uplifts within foreland fold-and-thrust belts than has been previously recognized.