DETRITAL-ZIRCON GEOCHRONOLOGY OF THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN FORELAND BASIN AND ITS SOURCE ROCKS

The southern Appalachian foreland basin is an Ordovican-Permian depositional center that accumulated sediment contributed by a variety of source terranes exposed during the Taconic, Acadian and Alleghanian orogenic episodes. We explore the connections between sediment sources, pathways and sinks through the lens of detrital-zircon geochronology to better reconstruct the Paleozoic history of terrane and continental collisions, mountain-belt kinematics, sediment recycling, and foreland-basin dynamics. We report U-Pb crystallization ages of detrital zircons collected from the Cambrian Hesse Sandstone, the Ordovician Colvin Mountain Sandstone, the Devonian Frog Mountain Formation, the Mississippian Hartselle and Pride Mountain Formations, and the Pennsylvanian Pottsville Formation. These results are compared with data reported from the central and northern Appalachians that: 1) identify connections between Proterozoic-Cambrian passive margin and Taconic & Alleghanian foreland basin zircon age signatures, 2) note the disappearance of Mesoproterozoic and late Archean zircons in the Acadian foreland basin strata and their reappearance in the Alleghanian foreland basin strata, and 3) the appearance of significant populations of Phanerozoic zircons in the Acadian and Alleghanian foreland basin strata. Collectively, we use these data to evaluate the spatio-temporal heterogeneitty of deformation and basin development of the greater Appalachian orogenic belt.