Geology topics

Wallace M. Cady

Publications and source records attributed to Wallace M. Cady.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS1975

Tectonic setting of the Tertiary volcanic rocks of the Olympic Peninsula, Washington

Lower and middle Eocene abyssal and Hawaiian type tholeiitic basalts form two accumulations that apparently were once far out on the east flank of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, within the Juan de Fuca plate. One of these (more than 15 km thick) is near the eastern and southeastern periphery of the Olympic Peninsula, and the other (about 5 km thick) is on the north. The tholeiites stratigraphically overlie and interfinger with Paleocene(?) and lower and middle Eocene marine turbidites and shales; one flow includes boulders that, like clasts in the sediments, were derived from the North American continental plate immediately to the east. The basalts are overlain stratigraphically by middle Eocene to middle Miocene clastic marine sedimentary rocks, which are in turn overlapped unconformably on the south and west by upper Miocene (?) and Pliocene, chiefly shallow-marine clastic rocks. These various peripheral rocks flank a middle or late Miocene structurally complex dome, or orocline convex to the east, in which originally east dipping and low angle late Eocene to late Miocene underthrusts are flexed. The outermost underthrust of the complex separates the chiefly volcanic peripheral rocks to the north, east, and south from stratigraphically correlative and comparable, though predominantly sedimentary, core rocks arranged in northwest trending arcuate belts or packets bounded by fault zones. Before underthrusting, and perhaps oroclinal folding connected with doming, the pre-middle Miocene section was possibly 150 to 200 km wide compared with the present Olympic Peninsula which is 120 km wide. The section accumulated on the ocean floor near the western margin of the continent, before and during subduction of the oceanic crust.

Washington↗

USGS1970

Sedimentary volumes and their significance

Sedimentary volumes are of prime interest in many fields of geology: as measures of erosional rates, of geochemical balance, and recently, with the virtual demonstration of continental drift, as measures of movement of the continental and oceanic plates. The Basement Map of the United States, published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1968, provides a partial basis for an improved estimate of the volume of Phanerozoic rock in the center, minous United States. The map requires correction for this purpose, because all metamorphic rocks of whatever age have been classed as basement. We have, therefore, attempted to allow for the metamorphic rocks of Phanerozoic age. We have made estimates of volumes for areas not controlled by contours on this map and have used such offshore data as we have been able to assemble from the literature in order to extend our estimates to include offshore sediments reasonably attributable to erosion from the area of the contiguous United States. Our results are as follows: We consider this estimate to be within 10 percent of the true volume. Of it, we estimate about 3.2 ×10 6 km 3 to be volcanic rock, not representing erosion of pre-existing rock. The remaining 56.8 × 10 6 km 3 , rounded to 57 × 10 6 km 3 , we consider products of continental denudation. This volume is so large, representing, as it does, only 5.3 percent of the continental surface of the earth and only a sixth of recognizable geologic time, that it appears to invalidate schemes of geochemical balance such as those of Clarke, Goldschmidt, and others. These students assume that the salt in the sea is a measure of the amount of some “average igneous rock” that has been eroded during the whole of geologic time to produce some “average sedimentary rock.” Instead, our result points strongly toward the hypothesis of Livingstone, Gregor, Earth, and others that the oceanic salt is merely the cyclic salt not yet returned to the continents in a continuing cycle. Assuming that this volume was derived from erosion of the contiguous United States—an assumption that we recognize as invalid in detail, though not seriously in error—we obtain an ostensible average rate of Phanerozoic erosion of about 10 m/ m.y., about a sixth of the present rate. But inasmuch as present erosion is attacking a surface that exposes about 76 percent sedimentary rocks and only 24 percent igneous, most of its product is recycled rather than first-cycle sediment. An analysis of the broad features of the paleo-geography of the country indicates that a similar disproportion between first-cycle and recycled sediment has been characteristic of nearly all the Phanerozoic. The ostensible erosion rate is therefore spurious, and it is likely that the average erosion rate durin g the Phanerozoic was more than half that of the present, and perhaps was nearly or quite equal to it. The great disparity in volumes of sediment offshore in the Atlantic and Pacific—in a ratio of more than 5 to 1—is consonant with expectations if the continent has been moving westward and over-riding the Pacific Basin on a Benioff fault system activated at the beginning of the Mesozoic, though now dormant.

Bulletin of the Geological Society of America↗

USGS1945

Stratigraphy and structure of west-central Vermont

The lithologic units recognizable in the fossiliferous succession along southern Lake Champlain are structurally continuous with and traceable eastward into the “marble belt” of west-central Vermont immediately west of the Green Mountain Front. They are also traceable northward through west-central Vermont into a succession in northwestern Vermont bounded on the east and west by major thrusts, where they pass laterally northeastward into fossiliferous shales, the faunal zones of which are correlated with those along southern Lake Champlain and in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. The Cambrian strata are traced into west-central from northwestern Vermont whereas the Ordovician correlation is with rocks in the Mohawk-Hudson-Champlain region. Certain of the Upper Cambrian strata can be correlated with established formations of this age in both of the outlying areas. The structural pattern reflects movements dependent upon the original distribution of sedimentary facies. Interbedded Carnbro-Ordovician limestones and dolomites grade westward into foreland sandstones and eastward into geosynclinal shales. Cambrian and early Ordovician sandstone tongues extend far to the east. Later Ordovician strata of the shale facies overlie the calcareous and sandy succession and are locally unconformable on it. In the Taconic Range allochthonous Cambrian strata of shale facies are superposed upon the autochthonous Ordovician beds. The rocks of the klippe were derived from a zone at least 50 miles east of the present westernmost exposures, arriving there by movements confined largely to the shale facies. Flexural folding and thrusting, effects of alternating competency and incompetency of the foreland sequence, affected the latter succession and possibly the Taconic Allochthone. Breaking of competent strata in the flexures initiated the thrusts; thrusting continued by the stripping of competent from incompetent beds. This was accompanied by counterclockwise rotation of the thrust slices around pivotal zones bordering on a foreland massif to the southwest. Thus rock cropping out in the north-south thrust slices originally extended northeast-southwest. The thrusts are concentric to the Adirondack crystallines and are cut by the Adirondack normal faults; probably they were warped during normal faulting and uplift of the Adirondacks.

Vermont↗