Collaborative Research: Continental Mountains in Extensional Environments: The Sierran Paradox

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9526992 Park The first phase of the Southern Sierra Continental Dynamics Project (SSCD) yielded the surprising result that a mountain range standing up to 2800 m higher than surrounding lowlands has a sialic crust of thickness nearly equal to that of the lowlands (30-40km), based on both passive and active seismic imaging. Three-dimensional tectonic reconstruction of the adjacent Basin and Range province suggests Neogene thinning of both eastern Sierran and Basin and Range crust by a factor of two. These results confirm an upper mantle origin for buoyancy beneath the range, and present perhaps the starkest illustration of a major unsolved problem in the dynamics of the cordilleran lithosphere: How can the profound loss of buoyancy from Neogene crustal thinning be reconciled with long-standing paleobotanical, geomorphological, and stratigraphic arguments indicating 1-2 km or more of Cordillera-wide late Cenozoic uplift? Obvious end member solutions include: (1) little or no thinning of eastern sierran crust (2) an unusually large decrease in density in the upper mantle (3) regional subsidence of a high, Andean-type plateau, rather than uplift. This award is one component of the second phase of the SSCD that has as it's goal the evaluation of the above hypotheses with a focused, multidisciplinary approach involving balanced cross-sections, seismic tomography, thermochronometry and isotope tracer studies, long-period MT, and low-temperature thermochronometry of Sierran granitoids. ***