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Sedimentologic And Stratigraphic Analysis Of Units Defining The Basal Sauk Supersequence Across The Craton Margin Hinge Zone, Southeastern California, Eric Gordon Hogan

Masters Theses

In the Death Valley and Mojave Desert regions of southeastern California, the contact separating the lower and middle members of the Wood Canyon Formation (WCF) is currently interpreted as a regional scale unconformity coincident with the base of the Sauk Sequence. Regional mapping of this surface, however, reveals a nonconformable contact with underlying crystalline basement in cratonic settings, and a relatively conformable contact atop a northwest thickening wedge of miogeoclinal strata that is capped by the lower member of the WCF. Consistent with an unconformity, the progressive loss of three carbonate units within the lower member of the WCF has …