Abstract Epithermal veins and breccias at the Kainantu gold–copper deposit in Papua New Guinea, host gold mineralization in NW–SE steeply dipping lodes. The lodes are parallel to a pre-mineralization dextral strike-slip shear-zone network, which is itself parallel in places to an early greenschist-facies cleavage in basement schists. The cleavage, shear zone and veins are all cut by dextral strike-slip faults. High Au grades correlate with areas of obliquity between the shear-zone fabrics and the cleavage, and plunge at approximately 40° SE in the plane of the lodes – coincident with minor fold axes related to a crenulation cleavage in the basement rocks. This clear structural history shows that gold mineralization was confined to a particular late structural event, but lode geometry was influenced by all previous structures, as well as being displaced by post-mineralization faulting. The north–south shortening recorded through most of the tectonic history can be related to Tertiary convergence along the major plate boundary located approximately 15 km north of the mine. However, mineralization occurred under a different tectonic regime from the current north–south convergence, when there was a change of tectonics between 9 and 6 Ma, possibly related to delamination.

Abstract The Cañones fault zone in north-central New Mexico is a boundary between the Colorado Plateau to the west and the Rio Grande rift to the east. It consists of a major fault, the Cañones fault, and a series of synthetic and antithetic normal faults within the Abiquiu embayment in the northwestern Española basin. The Cañones fault is a southeast-dipping high-angle normal fault, striking ~N20°E in the south, N40°E in the middle, and east-west at its northern end. The synthetic and antithetic faults are sub-parallel to the major fault. Detailed fault kinematic studies from the master fault reveal that the trends of slickenlines range S85°E - S70°E, and average approximately S76°E. Slickenlines on antithetic faults trend S20°W – N30°W, clustering at ~ N70°W. The attitude of fault surfaces and slickenlines indicate east-southeast/west-northwest extension within the Cañones Fault Zone. The sense of motion on the major fault is normal dominantly with left-slip. Fault throw is at least 225 m, based on Mesozoic units as hanging wall and footwall cutoffs. Thus, the heave is as ~143 m and the left-lateral displacement is ~60 m, given the averaged fault attitudes. In contrast to sub-horizontal Permian-Triassic units in its footwall, hanging wall strata of the Cañones fault zone dips in two directions: west-dipping Jurassic Entrada, Todilto, and Morrison formations; and south-east-dipping Eocene El Rito, Oligocene Ritito, and Oligocene-Miocene Abiquiu formations. Tilted Jurassic strata suggest that the overall structure is monoclinal, probably resulting from Laramide orogeny shortening. The Eocene-Miocene basin fill sediments, surprisingly, dip 10° – 30° away from the Cañones Fault, instead of dipping northwest towards the fault. This phenomenon, in contrast to the prediction of the rollover structure, suggests a different mechanism on this fault zone. Field observation provides direct evidence that basinward tilting is accommodated by multiple antithetic normal faults that cut through Permian to Miocene units. We propose that extensional fault-propagation folding model is a possible mechanism to result in the regional tilting of the basin fill. During upward propagation of the fault tip, horizontal-axis rotation and antithetic and synthetic faulting occur within a triangle zone above the fault tip. Alternatively, a buried large-scale low-angle normal fault can also generate such basinward tilting. In this scenario, the Cañones fault and other southeast-dipping normal faults are antithetic faults that grow on the detachment. These hypothetical mechanisms take into account the antithetic faulting within a rift-bounding fault zone and can be indicative of the evolution of other rift basins in which basin fills dip to the axis, such as the eastern Española basin and San Luis basin in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

The structural geometry of transfer and accommodation zones that relay strain between extensional domains in rifted crust has been addressed in many studies over the past 30 years. However, details of the kinematics of deformation and related stress changes within these zones have received relatively little attention. In this study we conduct the first-ever systematic, multi-basin fault-slip measurement campaign within the late Cenozoic Rio Grande rift of northern New Mexico to address the mechanisms and causes of extensional strain transfer associated with a broad accommodation zone. Numerous (562) kinematic measurements were collected at fault exposures within and adjacent to the NE-trending Santo Domingo Basin accommodation zone, or relay, which structurally links the N-trending, right-stepping en echelon Albuquerque and Española rift basins. The following observations are made based on these fault measurements and paleostresses computed from them. (1) Compared to the typical northerly striking normal to normal-oblique faults in the rift basins to the north and south, normal-oblique faults are broadly distributed within two merging, NE-trending zones on the northwest and southeast sides of the Santo Domingo Basin. (2) Faults in these zones have greater dispersion of rake values and fault strikes, greater dextral strike-slip components over a wide northerly strike range, and small to moderate clockwise deflections of their tips. (3) Relative-age relations among fault surfaces and slickenlines used to compute reduced stress tensors suggest that far-field, ~E-W–trending σ 3 stress trajectories were perturbed 45° to 90° clockwise into NW to N trends within the Santo Domingo zones. (4) Fault-stratigraphic age relations constrain the stress perturbations to the later stages of rifting, possibly as late as 2.7–1.1 Ma. Our fault observations and previous paleomagnetic evidence of post–2.7 Ma counterclockwise vertical-axis rotations are consistent with increased bulk sinistral-normal oblique shear along the Santo Domingo rift segment in Pliocene and later time. Regional geologic evidence suggests that the width of active rift faulting became increasingly confined to the Santo Domingo Basin and axial parts of the adjoining basins beginning in the late Miocene. We infer that the Santo Domingo clockwise stress perturbations developed coevally with the oblique rift segment mainly due to mechanical interactions of large faults propagating toward each other from the adjoining basins as the rift narrowed. Our results suggest that negligible bulk strike-slip displacement has been accommodated along the north-trending rift during much of its development, but uncertainties in the maximum ages of fault slip do not allow us to fully evaluate and discriminate between earlier models that invoked northward or southward rotation and translation of the Colorado Plateau during early (Miocene) rifting.

Integrated mapping, fault-kinematic, paleomagnetic, and gravity analyses around the Rhodes Salt Marsh extensional basin, located within the east-west–trending Mina deflection of the central Walker Lane, reveal that from 8.0 to 9.0 km of late Cenozoic displacement was accommodated on a curved array of faults. The dominant slip on the faults systematically varies from left-oblique, to normal, and to right-oblique as fault strike changes from east, to north-northeast, and to north-northwest, respectively. Kinematic consistency of fault slickenline rakes, preservation of displacement budget, and paleomagnetic data from a pluton and volcanic rocks in the fault-system hanging wall indicate that the curved fault geometry is primary and not due to superposition of two fault systems nor to later vertical-axis rotation. Large-magnitude extension was localized at the apex of the curved faults and resulted in the formation of an ~3.0-km-deep prismatic basin beneath Rhodes Salt Marsh. The offset geologic structures and geophysical basin models indicate that hanging-wall displacement diverged around the curved fault array and resulted in finite flattening, with primary and secondary extensional axes oriented west-northwest and north-northeast, respectively. Fault-slip inversion yields two directions of extension consistent with the finite strain axes, and slickenlines with mutually crosscutting relations indicate formation during incremental flattening. Although broadly contemporaneous, extension parallel to the primary and secondary extension axes alternated at periods ranging from months to as much as several hundred thousand years. Large through-going structures sustained extension directions recorded geodetically and seismologically through multiple seismic cycles. In contrast, the alternation between primary and secondary extension directions recorded by a strainmeter suggests that, on small structures contained within fault-bounded blocks, the two extension directions alternated over time scales of as little as 2 yr.