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The geological development of the Pacific Northwest margin of North America from earliest Tertiary time to the present has been dominated by the effects of plate convergence. During this period the North America Plate has moved slowly but increasingly westward as the Atlantic basin widened, and has collided with eastward-moving oceanic plates formed in the Pacific basin. Much of the geologic record of this collision has been removed by subduction of the oceanic plate beneath North America, with the exception of limited quantities of accreted and deformed oceanic rocks, and has been covered by younger volcanic and sedimentary material on the continent. Thus, a description of the plate tectonic evolution of this active continental margin is speculative and based on assumptions and inferences from the fragmentary geological evidence. This is certainly a problem common to all convergent margins, but many factors in the convergence history of this plate boundary make it unusual and offer the promise of isolating a few of the variables in subduction-related processes.

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