T130 Structure and Tectonics of the South-Central United States: Craton to Gulf of Mexico and the Annual George P. Woollard Award Presentation

Monday, 26 September 2016
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Room 407

EOCENE FAULTING AND STRUCTURE, TIPTON COUNTY, TN, WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR CENOZOIC STRESS FIELD ROTATION

Paper number: T130-9
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 3:30 PM – 3:45 PM

Authors

Abstract

At the Mississippi River bluff line north of Memphis, TN, lies the complex intersection of the eastern Reelfoot Rift margin, the Meeman-Shelby Fault, and a newly identified thrust fault, the Sugar Creek fault. The Eastern Reelfoot Rift Margin is a seismogenic, reactivated Proterozoic/early Paleozoic normal fault zone which strikes approximately N45E and shows right-lateral focal-plane mechanism solutions and reverse displacement in the Cenozoic. Investigations in Shelby County have revealed evidence of Quaternary and Holocene fault offsets in the Meeman-Shelby fault zone, a pair of high-angle reverse faults striking N25E, with a possible right-lateral strike-slip component. Both the Reelfoot Rift margin and Meeman-Shelby Fault are consistent with the modern E-W horizontal compressive stress field. Twenty kilometers further northeast, mapping of Eocene and younger strata exposed in Tipton County has revealed an east-west striking thrust fault, the Sugar Creek fault, that is limited to Eocene strata. Mapping has also revealed an asymmetric, south verging, E-W striking anticline that shows evidence of Quaternary deformation. The strikes of both the Sugar Creek fault and the anticline are consistent with an anomalous Cenozoic N-S compressional stress. Fracture data suggest a NW-SE to N-S compressive stress. This would require a clockwise rotation of 45-90o from either the modern stress field or the oft-invoked NE-SW Eocene stress field based on subsidence in the Mississippi Embayment.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 48, No. 7

doi: 10.1130/abs/2016AM-286728

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