Picuris orogeny

The Picuris orogeny was an orogenic event in what is now the Southwestern United States from 1.43 to 1.3 billion years ago in the Calymmian Period of the Mesoproterozoic.

1200–1000 Mya Grenville orogeny during the final assembly of the supercontinent Rodinia, which ended an 800-million-year episode of convergent boundary tectonism.

[3][4][5][6][7] Age and isotope data show that southern North America is composed of a series of northeast-trending provinces representing island arc terranes accreted onto the 1800 Mya core of Laurentia.

This created short-lived extensional basins that accumulated sand and high-silica volcanic debris to form Proterozoic quartzite-rhyolite successions.

[15] Early evidence for a major tectonic event at around 1400 Mya was the presence of numerous batholiths of the age in the southwestern United States.

[16] Direct evidence for uplift in the form of sedimentation was lacking until detrital zircon geochronology established that some formations of the Vadito and Hondo Groups, long assumed to be Statherian in age, were actually Calymmian.

[18] A number of quartzite-rhyolite successions previously associated with the Mazatzal orogeny have been shown to contain both Paleoproterozoic and Mesoproterozoic formations, based on detrital zircon geochronology.

In contrast, Livingston's work in the Upper Salt River Canyon utilized Rb-Sr dating techniques to estimated the timing of the Mazatzal orogeny between 1425-1380 +/-100 Mya.

Detrital zircons from the Hopi Springs Shale in the northern Mazatzal Mountains yielded a maximum depositional age (MDA) of 1571 Mya.

[17] However, there are indications of three distinct orogenic episodes at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, with an exhumation surface separating Yavapai and Mazatzal events.