Interior Western United States

The GSA Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City provided a large and diverse terrain for field trips—from the Basin and Range to the Rocky Mountains, from the Snake River Plain, across the Colorado Plateau, to the Mojave Desert. This volume contains 22 field trip articles, nearly all of those run at the 2005 meeting. All combine the latest research with useful road logs to spectacular and often classic geologic settings. The regional tour has a core of structure and stratigraphy-paleontology contributions, and is rounded off with volcanic, glacial, lacustrine, fluvial geomorphology, neotectonic, geologic hazard, and geoarchaeology articles.
Paleoseismology and geomorphology of the Hurricane Fault and Escarpment
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Published:January 01, 2005
Abstract
The Hurricane Fault is one of the longest and most active late Cenozoic normal faults in southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona. This fault shows evidence of tectonic activity during the late Tertiary and Quaternary, neotectonism involving the Hurricane Fault as well as the Toroweap Fault imply encroaching Basin and Range extension onto the Colorado Plateau. Paleoseismology investigations suggest that the Hurricane Fault poses a seismic hazard to the southwestern Utah area. During the trip, we will examine evidence of late Pleistocene and earliest Holocene(?) surface-rupturing faulting along the Shivwits and Whitmore Canyon sections of the fault. The Hurricane Fault separates the Uinkaret and Shivwits plateaus and displacement along the fault produced the spectacular Hurricane Escarpment. We will see late Quaternary land-forms related to back-wasting and mass movement along the Hurricane Escarpment and look at evidence of the style and age estimates of late Pleistocene fan deposition.
- alluvial fans
- Arizona
- Cenozoic
- Claron Formation
- clastic sediments
- colluvium
- Colorado Plateau
- Cretaceous
- digital terrain models
- earthquakes
- fault scarps
- faults
- field trips
- fluvial features
- geomorphology
- Hurricane Fault
- landforms
- Mancos Shale
- Mesozoic
- Mohave County Arizona
- Navajo Sandstone
- neotectonics
- North America
- Paleogene
- paleoseismicity
- road log
- sediments
- tectonics
- Tertiary
- United States
- Utah
- Washington County Utah
- southwestern Utah
- northwestern Arizona