Pan-Continental River System Draining Grenville Orogen Recorded by U-Pb and Sm-Nd Geochronology of Neoproterozoic Quartzarenites and Mudrocks, Northwestern Canada

The Great Grenvillian Sedimentation Episode: Record of Supercontinent Rodinia's assembly

“…29.3). A follow-up study on correlative deposits from the northern Canadian Cordillera 1000 km away (Rainbird et al, 1997), and from Paleozoic strata along the western margin of North America (Gehrels et al, 1995), documented the widespread occurrence of Grenville-age detritus thereby lending support to the findings of the initial study. The advent of ion microprobe and laser-ablation ICP-MS analytical technology has facilitated numerous detrital zircon provenance studies of similar-age rocks, younger rocks, and modern sediments and has revealed that the Grenvillian sedimentation episode was voluminous and widespread (e.g., Becker et al, 2005;Cawood et al, 2007;Dickinson, 2008;Eriksson et al, 2003;Mueller et al, 2007).…”

“…We consider that the sediments were transported away from the orogeny by a pan-continental river system, the proximal and distal elements of which are preserved in sedimentary basins mainly in North America, Greenland, and the United Kingdom (see Rainbird et al, 1992Rainbird et al, , 1997. Since the publication of the big river model, numerous studies, all of them employing detrital zircon geochronology, have added additional pieces to the puzzle of Rodinian paleogeography (Cawood et al, 2004;Kirkland et al, 2008;Krabbendam et al, 2008;Mueller et al, 2007;Santos et al, 2002;Dehler et al, 2010).…”

“…29.2) and were the first indication of the potentially enormous breadth and width of the Grenvillian sedimentation event (Rainbird et al, 1997). These deposits are mature quartzarenite sandstones bodies, up to 1.8 km thick in the case of the Katherine Group in the Mackenzie Mountains (see, Long et al, 2008).…”

Insights into North American Paleogeography and Paleotectonics from U–Pb ages of detrital zircons in Mesozoic strata of the Colorado Plateau, USA

“…U-Pb ages of individual detrital zircons (DZ) in voluminous sedimentary assemblages exposed on multiple continents have provided evidence for the derivation of detritus from far-flung provenances that could not have been identified from conventional sedimentological studies alone (Rainbird et al 1997;Pell et al 1997Pell et al , 2000Allen et al 2006;Mueller et al 2007;Prokopiev et al 2008). Facies patterns and paleocurrent or paleowind vectors document directions of sediment transport at sites of sedimentation, but provide no firm information about provenance.…”

Trace element mobility in dolomitic argillites of the Mesoproterozoic Belt-Purcell Supergroup, Western North America

“…Basinal fluids in the Belt-Purcell basin could have been derived from three main sources: (1) meteoric water from the continent, and especially from the large-river system draining into the Belt-Purcell basin (Rainbird et al, 1997;Ross and Villenueve, 2003); (2) sea-water from the basin itself as recorded at the syn-sedimentary Pb-Zn-Ag Sullivan deposit in the Lower Belt-Purcell in British Columbia (Lydon, 2000); and (3) indigenous post-depositional fluids derived from the dehydration transformation of smectite to illite in the Lower and Middle part of the succession due to burial pressure and temperature (Lydon, 2000;Milliken, 2003;Bozkaya and Yalcin, 2004). A fourth source could be from the basement rocks.…”