Left-lateral intraplate deformation along the Amarillo-Wichita Uplift. Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma

The west-northwest trending Amarillo-Wichita Uplift in the Texas Panhandle and southwestern Oklahoma was produced as a result of recurrent large-scale intraplate deformation during the Late Paleozoic Ancestral Rocky Mountain orogeny. The area was broadly folded in the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian. Cambrian through Devonian units were downwarped into the Anadarko Basin, truncated by erosion, and unconformably overlain by Upper Devonian to Mississippian strata. To the south, Mississippian units overlie Ordovician strata and Precambrian basement along the axis of the Texas Arch. Strike-slip faulting along the axis of the Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen formed the Amarillo-Wichita Uplift during the Pennsylvanian. In the Texas Panhandle, the uplift has been internally deformed into a series of pull-apart grabens which are filled with up to 1500 m of Pennsylvanian arkosic debris. The Whittenburg Trough, a large pull-apart basin along the southwest flank of the uplift, contains about 2300 m of syntectonic deposits. Erosional edges of older units beneath the Mississippian are presently offset 120 km in a left-lateral sense along the uplift. Pre-Mississippian units located in the Hardeman Basin of southwestern Oklahoma originally aligned with those in the western Anadarko Basin of the Texas Panhandle. Restoration to the pre-faulting configuration also realigns offset Proterozoicmore » basement terranes. The orientation of strike-slip and reverse faults and related folds indicate northeast-southwest directed compression during the Pennsylvanian.« less