Post-Mineral Normal Faulting in Arizona Porphyry Systems

Abstract

In the Basin and Range province of southwestern North America, Oligocene and Miocene normal faults are superimposed upon the Late Cretaceous-early Tertiary magmatic arc. This study examines tilted fault blocks containing dismembered pieces of porphyry systems, including pieces below and peripheral to ore bodies, that are exposed at the modern surface. Features in the magmatic-hydrothermal porphyry systems are used to place constraints on the style of extension in Arizona, and reconstructions of extension are used to examine the deep and peripheral portions of porphyry systems to provide a more complete understanding of porphyry systems as a whole. The Eagle Pass, Tea Cup, and Sheep Mountain porphyry systems of Arizona are examined in this study. In all the study areas, previous interpretations of the style of extension involved strongly listric normal faults. However, similar amounts of tilting observed in hanging wall and footwall rocks, as well as structure contour maps of fault planes, require that down dip curvature on faults was minimal (<1°/km. Instead, extension is shown here to have occurred as sets of nearly planar, "domino-style" normal faults were superimposed upon one another, including in the Pinaleño metamorphic core complex. Reconstructions of Tertiary extension reveal that sodic (-calcic) alteration is occurs 2-4 km peripheral to, and greisen alteration is found structurally below and overlapping with, potassic alteration. In addition, a preliminary reconstruction of extension across the Laramide magmatic arc reveals that the geometry, as revealed by known porphyry systems, is of similar scale to that of other magmatic arcs. These results help further the debate surrounding competing models of continental extension, and combine with previous work to provide a more complete understanding of the geometries of Arizona porphyry systems at the district and arc scale.