A gigantic Miocene landslide in the Wasatch Range, Utah, USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The structure and origin of the east Traverse Mountains, which trend perpendicular to Utah's Wasatch normal fault, have been debated for over a century. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the east Traverse Mountains are not a fault-bounded tectonic feature, but are instead an ~75–150 km3 mega-landslide deposit that catastrophically slid 16 km from the upper reaches of the Little Cottonwood stock to its present location in the late Miocene. Evidence includes pervasive brecciation of quartzites, limestones, volcanic strata, and dikes in the east Traverse Mountains that are broken into fragments <10 cm across; fracture surfaces are locally polished and have slickenlines. Pseudotachylyte and cataclasite near the slide's inferred base consistently dip shallowly to the southwest parallel to slickenline orientations; they form a shear zone that was offset by later slip on the steeper Fort Canyon normal fault. A swarm of andesitic dikes and a separate set of Mo-mineralized pebble dikes within the landslide's inferred source region appear to correlate with similar dike swarms in the east Traverse Mountains based on dike orientations, mineralogy, geochemistry, and age, suggesting that they have been offset 16 km to the southwest. Additional evidence for the landslide includes displacement of distinctive normal faults and sedimentary strata now found in the east Traverse Mountains and anomalously young cooling ages (ca. 6 Ma) for the Oligocene granodiorite in the landslide source. Near the western flank of the megabreccia, a distinctive Miocene conglomerate within a succession of fine-grained lacustrine sediments appears to be the sedimentary response to the landslide. U-Pb ages of post-slide opal (6.1 ± 0.9 Ma) and a pre-slide tuff (6.62 ± 0.03 Ma) constrain the age of the slide. Understanding this mega-landslide is crucial for assessing potential hazards in large normal fault systems in extensional basins and for distinguishing large landslides from tectonic detachment faults.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".