This geological investigation will produce critical new data on sediment composition and provenance of the Pottsville formation in northern Alabama and Mississippi in order to document the origin and history of the Appalachian and Ouachita mountain belts. Previous studies suggest that the upper Paleozoic Pottsville sediments of the Black Warrior and Cahaba basins were derived partly from the Ouachitas. Our preliminary work, however, suggests primary derivation of Pottsville sediment from all three mountain building events of the Appalachians. The study region encompasses large segments of Alabama where Auburn University has ongoing outreach activities. This study seeks to promote scientific exchange and research activities between a number of colleges, K-12 schools, state agencies, and private companies. Many of the fossil fuel resources in this region (coal, natural gas, coalbed methane) are found in the sediments targeted in this study, potentially engendering considerable public interest in exciting science. The principal investigators will seek to broaden the experiences of graduate and undergraduate students, both female and male, with a goal of having active participation from minority-rich Lee and Macon counties of Alabama. Results from this project may contribute significantly to the development of a global model of erosion from mountain belts and deposition in adjacent sedimentary basins.
The Black Warrior and Cahaba basins are important late Paleozoic depocenters of clastic wedges in eastern North America, and they potentially hold critical information on tectonic history, including that of the Appalachian and the Ouachita mountain belts. Large sections of these orogenic sedimentary wedges have been drilled, and marginal uplifts expose stratigraphic sequences appropriate for detailed provenance studies, including sandstone petrography, heavy mineral analysis, mineral chemistry, and 40Ar/39Ar single-crystal muscovite age dates. In several ways, the Himalayan-Assam-Bengal depositional system provides an intriguing modern analog for the Paleozoic Appalachian-Ouachita-Black Warrior and Cahaba system of eastern North America. Our work with cutting-edge techniques on Cenozoic clastic wedges from the foreland basins of the Himalayas has helped us develop a model for orogenic sedimentation, basin subsidence, depocenter shifting and sediment transport paths. Here we propose to apply our model of denudation and sedimentation based on a Cenozoic detrital system to a Paleozoic orogenic dispersal repository. This study involving detrital geochronology and detailed sediment composition of the Black Warrior and Cahaba basins of Alabama and Mississippi has a high probability of new discovery of source terranes that once existed in the southern Appalachians. This study also has the high potential of providing a new tectonic scenario of terrane convergence, clastic dispersal network, basinal configuration, petroleum potential, and tectonic geomorphology for the upper Paleozoic of eastern North America.
