This New England Appalachians are composed of several tectonic blocks whose relationships to one another are relatively unknown or poorly constrained. Existing models indicate origins are diverse and spatially separate, so detrital zircons in sedimentary assemblages may be distinctive. This project will apply a recently developed direct 11 evaporation mass spectrometric technique for single zircon grains to several of the tectonic blocks to characterize the age of continental and/or volcanic-arc sources of the sediments included in each terrane. Results will evaluate the utility of this technique in testing the various models that have specified the relative locations of blocks through the Paleozoic evolution of the Appalachians.
