Authors: K.M. Khudoley and A.A. Meyerhoff
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A Russian from Leningrad and a North American from Oklahoma synthesize the results of their own researches and the data from the unpublished and published literature on the geology and geophysics of the Greater Antilles island arc. The authors agree on most observational data, but differ strongly in many interpretations. Consequently each author presents his own viewpoint In this manner, under a single title and cover, two schools of thought are combined to illustrate one method of practicing T.C. Chamberlin's "method of multiple working hypotheses." A truism of Caribbean geology is that it is one of the most accessible, yet least understood, of the world's island arcs. This volume—despite a large number of summary papers and books written on the region—contains the first detailed synthesis of Greater Antillean geology since the publication of Charles Schuchert's book in 1935. Moreover, it is an attempt to overcome in part, for the Greater Antilles, one of geology's greatest stigmas—eloquently expressed by Mark Twain: "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact" (from Life on the Mississippi, Chap. 17). The Greater Antilles orthogeosyncline formed in latest Jurassic-Early Cretaceous time from Cuba to the Virgin Islands, and persisted until Eocene time. A Cretaceous foredeep trough faced the western Jamaica Paleozoic(?) "backland," which the writers interpret to be an eastward extension of the Paleozoic-Tertiary Northern Central American orogen. Since Eocene time, isolated basins developed in which carbonate sedimentation was dominant, and the Greater Antilles no longer was a tectonically active arc. Orogeny and related crustal movements have been almost continuous since the Jurassic. Wrench-type and vertical block faulting, beginning locally in middle Cretaceous or earlier time, gradually fragmented the once-continuous orthogeosyncline. Granodioritic intrusions, having radiometric dates ranging from 180 to 46 my, are scattered through the orthogeosynclinal sequence. Tectonism—not of the island-arc type—continues today.
Published: 11/01/1971
ISBN Number: 0-8137-1129-0
Pages: 190
Product Category: Memoirs