Publications

The only pillow basalt in synorogenic sedimentary rocks at the exterior margin of the Taconic orogen in eastern North America is at Stark's Knob in eastern New York. Earlier reported as extrusive into allochthonous Ordovician slope and rise facies, this small lens (ca. 125+ m long, 39 m thick) is a fault-bounded block in Upper Ordovician melange under the Taconian frontal thrust. Its N-MORB (normal mid-ocean ridge basalt) basalt geochemistry and spinel composition are characteristic of oceanic ridge settings at a water depth of 2 km or more. Abundant limestone lenses on pillows and lava shelves within pillows yielded a middle Late Ordovician gastropod. The limestones are reconciled with this extrusion depth and with limited early Paleozoic pelagic carbonate production by lime mud transport from the Laurentian platform or abiotic carbonate precipitation with sea-water heating during basalt extrusion. A genetic relationship between the parautochthonous Stark's Knob basalts and the allochthonous Jonestown volcanics in slope and rise facies of the Hamburg klippe, eastern Pennsylvania, is likely. Both are Ordovician MORB basalts that reflect volcanism on the subducting outer trench slope prior to the Taconic arc – Laurentia collision. Taconic orogenesis may have led to basalt production on the subducting plate by (1) the setting up of orogen-parallel, predominantly strike-slip motion on the subducting slab with MORB basalt generated at offsets in a setting analogous to the Gulf of California or (2) development of faults in a flexure-induced extensional regime. By either process, mafic volcanism appears to be a rare but tectonically significant process on outer trench slopes as continental margins or oceanic plates enter subduction zones.