Detrital zircon U-Pb data reveal a Mississippian sediment dispersal network originating in the Appalachian orogen, traversing North America along its southern shelf, and reaching as far as the southwest United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology reveals an increasing proportion of Grenville-age (ca. 0.95–1.3 Ga) and ca. 300–480 Ma grains in late Paleozoic strata of the SW United States. These grain populations are interpreted to have been sourced from the Appalachian orogen, though the precise timing, transport mechanisms, and pathway(s) of sediment dispersal remain unclear. We combine 35,796 published detrital zircon U-Pb ages from Ordovician to Pennsylvanian strata of southern Canada, northern Mexico, and the U.S. with new data (1,628 ages) from Kansas, Missouri, Montana, and South Dakota. These data are integrated with sedimentary structural data and paleogeographic reconstructions to reveal temporal and spatial patterns of the sediment routing system at continent scale. In Ordovician time, North America was partitioned into western, central, and eastern domains in which strata were derived primarily from the Peace River Arch, the Superior Craton, and the Appalachians, respectively. Silurian–Devonian time saw limited integration of these domains, corresponding with the delivery of Appalachian-derived detritus to the Midcontinent via prograding deltas and westward-flowing rivers. Appalachian detritus flowed westward in Mississippian time, accumulating in the Appalachian foreland and continuing westward through Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Arizona, and California along the continental shelf. Given that North America was at equatorial latitudes and was inundated by the Kaskaskia sea at this time, westward dispersal likely occurred by trade wind–driven longshore drift, waves, tides, and marine currents, with the possible added contribution of hurricanes. Modern analogs for the southern margin of North America during Mississippian time (e.g., the Great Barrier Reef and the east coast of South America) indicate that long-distance (>1000 km) shelf-parallel sediment transport is readily accomplished through fair-weather processes and extreme events. Finally, Appalachian-derived detritus became widespread throughout North America following regression of the Kaskaskia sea in Pennsylvanian time, likely via fluvial, deltaic, and aeolian processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".