signature=f2ef44dacf3489db1ea96fe474247812,Silurian Roundstone Conglomerates of Coastal Maine and Ad...

摘要：

Six roundstone conglomerates ofuncertain but probable middle to late Silurian age at Oak Bay, New Brunswick, and at Wesley, Addison, Douglas Islands, Turtle Island, and Flanders Bay, Maine, consist of rounded to subangular pebbles, cobbles, and boulders of unfoliated and little metamorphosed felsic and mafic volcanic rocks, collectively several varieties of granitoids, and a suite of generally arkosic volcanogenic sandstones and siltstones. Clasts from the generally foliated schists and metavolcanic rocks of the pre-Silurian Ellsworth, Columbia Falls, and Cookson Formations in the coastal volcanic belt of Maine are absent.Except for that at Wesley, the conglomerates are unstratified and some are at least several hundred meters thick. At Oak Bay and Addison the matrix is clast-supporting; the others are generally clast-supported. These disorganized conglomerates were emplaced as debris flows, subaqueous except perhaps for the Douglas Islands. The conglomerates originated as stream gravels in a volcanic upland and eventually were deposited in thick alluvial fans or fan deltas along the fault-bounded border of the upland. An episode of faulting, perhaps associated with earthquakes, and further uplift destabilized the fans, initiating landslides which moved downslope towards and into the neighboring basin as debris nows.Within the coastal belt of Maine and New Brunswick, two lithologic provinces qualify as possible provenances of the clasts. One is uplifted Silurian volcanic terrain, in which Silurian granites have recently been identified in addition to the much more widespread Devonian ones. The other possibility is the Precambrian-Cambrian rocks of the Avalonian terrane of the Long Reach-Saint John area, New Brunswick which have the requisite volcanic and granitic rocks, many of them unfoliated. A third alternative underlies the Gulf of Maine. Gravitational and aeromagnetic signatures and deep seismic profiling have identified Avalonian terrane nooring the gulf, a possible source for clasts in the Addison and Douglas Islands conglomerate near the coast.The uplift and faulting to which the conglomerates testify may reflect block faulting in an extensional tectonic regime during Silurian volca nism. Alternatively, they may have resulted from crustal strains imposed dur ing the final stages of emplacement of the suspect Avalonian terrane.

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