HR: 0800h
AN: T31C-0589 [Abstracts]
TI: Structural controls on the Surprise Valley fault system, northwestern margin of the Basin and Range, based on combined geologic, potential-field, and seismic reflection modeling
AU: * Egger, A E
EM: annegger@stanford.edu
AF: School of Earth Sciences
Stanford University, Building 320, Stanford, CA 94305-2115,
AU: Glen, J M
EM: jglen@usgs.gov
AF: U.S. Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025,
AU: Ponce, D A
EM: ponce@usgs.gov
AF: U.S. Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025,
AU: Lerch, D W
EM: dlerch@frc.edu
AF: Environmental Studies
Feather River College, 570 Golden Eagle Ave., quincy, CA 95971,
AU: Klemperer, S L
EM: sklemp@stanford.edu
AF: Department of Geophysics
Stanford University, Mitchell building, Stanford, CA 94305-2215,
AB:
Surprise Valley of northeastern California is a major high-angle fault-bounded basin that marks the northwestern
margin of the Basin and Range province. On the western margin of the valley, the east-dipping Surprise Valley
Fault separates the valley from the Warner Range and accommodates at least 7 km of normal slip. On the
eastern margin, a west-dipping normal fault has exhumed the Hays Canyon Range, but offset along this fault
decreases significantly to the north. In between these two major faults, numerous Holocene fault scarps and hot
springs suggest that the area is still actively extending. Previous workers have mapped several NW-SE-trending
structures cutting across the valley that control the geothermal system, but the role of these structures in basin
evolution and their relationship to the range-bounding faults is poorly understood.
The Surprise Valley fault system is of particular interest given its location at the margin of the Basin and Range,
its relative isolation from other major normal fault systems, and the recent offset along the faults. Our focus is on
identifying and characterizing intra-basin and basin-bounding faults and structures and constraining the basin
geometry through a combination of geological mapping, potential field modeling and seismic reflection modeling.
We have collected nearly 800 new gravity stations, ~75 line-kilometers of truck-towed magnetometer data,
and ~17 km of foot-traversed gradient magnetometer data within and surrounding Surprise Valley for
potential field modeling. These data, combined with new 1:24,000-scale geologic mapping and a ~16 km
vibrator-source reflection survey collected in the summer of 2004, confirm the importance of the NW-trending
structures not only in the distribution of hot springs, but also the location and orientation of accommodation zones
between N-S trending, antithetic normal fault systems. The NW trend of these structures, including the Lake City
Fault Zone and Fandango Valley, parallels a prominent regional system of faults that includes the Eugene-Denio
and Mt. McLoughlin fault zones to the north and the Likely Fault to the south. Field relationships imply that both N-
S and NW-SE trending fault sets have been active since the late Tertiary. The widespread, NW-trending fabric,
locally present in the Lake City fault zone may be accommodating strike-slip motion predicted in recently
published GPS data.
DE: 1219 Gravity anomalies and Earth structure (0920, 7205, 7240)
DE: 1517 Magnetic anomalies: modeling and interpretation
DE: 7205 Continental crust (1219)
DE: 8107 Continental neotectonics (8002)
DE: 8109 Continental tectonics: extensional (0905)
SC: Tectonophysics [T]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting