This project has been aimed at testing the hypothesis that the Laramide orogeny and the formation of the Rocky Mountains was due to horizontal subduction of oceanic crust under the western United States. Development and testing of a finite-element code for continental deformation has been completed. This renewal will make technical improvements to the efficiency, thermal boundary conditions, and plate-tectonics inputs to the model, find steady- state models of the Cretaceous Sevier Orogeny, conduct unified models for the Cretaceous-Tertiary history of North America and compare the results to geologic and geophysical data, and to apply the same program to test for similar tectonics in other areas of the world.
