Timing of Cache Creek Ocean closure: insights from new Jurassic radiolarian ages in British Columbia and Yukon and their significance for Canadian Cordillera tectonics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The closure of the Cache Creek Ocean during the Jurassic led to the structuration of the Canadian Cordillera. To reassess the timing of this major tectonic event, this study proposes a biochronological review of all the youngest radiolarian-bearing localities of the Cache Creek Terrane in British Columbia and Yukon using updated radiolarian biozonations and taxonomy, complemented by new data from the type locality. The results show that all ages are Early Jurassic and fairly homogenous along the entire terrane. All the youngest siliceous rocks are restricted to the late Sinemurian – early Toarcian interval (∼195–180 Ma). The youngest well-dated pelagic cherts are early Pliensbachian, with slightly younger siliceous argillites of Pliensbachian and possibly early Toarcian age. These results suggest that Cache Creek deep pelagic sedimentation ceased fairly synchronously along the entire belt, probably during the Pliensbachian (∼191–183 Ma), predating the final closure of the basin when Cache Creek units were thrust over Stikinia and Quesnellia in the Middle and Late Jurassic. This apparent synchronicity should result in re-evaluating the tectonic mechanism of the Cache Creek “entrapment model” in its present form. The study also shows that pelagic sedimentation ceased 22–31 million years earlier in the Cache Creek Terrane than in the Bridge River Terrane, confirming the stratigraphic discrepancy between the two terranes during the Jurassic.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".