Three crustal zones in the Thor–Odin – Pinnacles area, southern Omineca Belt, British Columbia

Abstract

The present crustal architecture of the southern Omineca Belt in the Canadian Cordillera is a product of Eocene extension and crustal thinning superimposed on a crust that was thickened and deformed during Paleozoic and Jurassic to Late Paleocene compression. Amphibolite-facies rocks exposed as gneiss complexes within the Shuswap Metamorphic Complex, in the southern Omineca Belt, were buried during compression and were exhumed in the lower plates of low- to moderate-angle plastic–brittle Eocene extensional faults.In the Thor–Odin – Pinnacles area three crustal zones, which have experienced different deformation and thermal histories, and intervening shear zones can be correlated with Lithoprobe seismic reflection data. The Basement Zone, which comprises crystalline basement and overlying supracrustal gneisses, is bounded above by the Monashee décollement, a deep-seated northeasterly directed Mesozoic–Paleocene thrust fault. In the hanging wall of the décollement, polydeformed gneisses and schists of the Middle Crustal Zone are characterized by Late Cretaceous–early Tertiary ductile strain, plutonism, and thermal quenching. They are bounded at the top by crustal-scale Eocene normal faults that juxtapose Upper Crustal Zone rocks characterized by Jurassic and older structures and a Jura-Cretaceous cooling history.Middle Crustal Zone rocks of the Thor–Odin – Pinnacles area are correlative with part of the Late Proterozoic Horsethief Creek Group and Cambrian to Jurassic strata and host extensive plutons, stocks, and sheets of the syntectonic and posttectonic Late Paleocene – Early Eocene Ladybird granite suite. Field mapping and geochronology indicate that (i) a substantial part of the penetrative compressional polydeformation history and the thermal peak of metamorphism within the Middle Crustal Zone occurred in the Late Cretaceous–Paleocene; (ii) thrusting on the Monashee décollement had ended by 58 Ma; (iii) the onset of extensional deformation either overlapped or closely followed the compressional regime; (iv) Middle Crustal Zone metamorphic and igneous rocks were hot in the Paleocene and cooled rapidly in the early Tertiary because of extensional denudation.