Elsevier

Cretaceous Research

Volume 91, November 2018, Pages 71-79
Cretaceous Research

Short communication
A Maastrichtian birth of the Ancestral Mississippi River system: Evidence from the U-Pb detrital zircon geochronology of the McNairy Sandstone, Illinois, USA

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cretres.2018.05.010Get rights and content

Abstract

Sediment dispersal patterns are integral to the understanding of Cretaceous paleogeography and tectonics. Detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology of fluvial/deltaic sandstones of the Maastrichtian (∼70 Ma) McNairy Sandstone (s = 5, n = 1458) at the northern end of the Mississippi Embayment documents the initiation of south-flowing drainage in the Laurentian midcontinent. The detrital zircon age spectra of the McNairy Sandstone include zircons from the Superior (>2.5 Ga), Penokean (1.8–1.9 Ga), Yavapai-Mazatzal (1.6–1.8 Ga), Midcontinent Granite-Rhyolite (1.3–1.5 Ga), Grenville (980–1300 Ma), and Taconic-Acadian (350–450 Ma) provinces. Grenville zircons account for 74% of the age spectrum. Taconic-Acadian grains also are important, comprising ∼10% of the age spectrum. The McNairy DZ age spectra are statistically indistinguishable from uppermost Pennsylvanian strata (i.e. the later Des Moinesian Copperas Creek Sandstone) in the Illinois Basin. These DZ age spectra are also indistinguishable from sands in the Modern Ohio and Tennessee River valleys. Based on this similarity, local Illinois Basin source areas contributed a previously unrecognized volume of sediment to the Mississippi Embayment as early as Maastrichtian time. Our interpretation includes a Cenomanian onset of subsidence in the southern Mississippi Embayment initiated by the rapid opening of the Gulf of Mexico. This subsidence propagated northward, and by the Maastrichtian, the Mississippi Embayment was the drainage axis for an Ancestral Mississippi that is recorded in both the Maastrichtian strata in the northern Mississippi Embayment and the Paleogene deposits in the southern part. Our interpretation shows the integration of an Ancestral Mississippi River occurred by the Maastrichtian, that the river continued through the Paleocene, and subsequently developed into the modern Mississippi River system.

Introduction

During Late Cretaceous time, North America was divided by the Western Interior Seaway (Fig. 1), which separated the north-trending Sevier foreland fold and thrust belt to the west (Laramidia) from the denuding Appalachian Mountains and Laurentian craton to the east (Appalachia; e.g. Williams and Stelck, 1975, Kauffman and Caldwell, 1993, DeCelles, 2004, Finzel, 2014). Based on faunal studies, these landmasses were no longer separated by the sea during earliest Maastrichtian time (e.g., Slattery et al., 2015, Berry, 2017) because of sea level fall.

The Illinois Basin is an intracratonic basin that extends across most of Illinois into Kentucky and Indiana - and contains more than 5 km of Paleozoic strata (Buschbach and Kolata, 1990, Kolata and Nelson, 1990, Kolata and Nelson, 1997, Kissock et al., 2017). Only three thin and discontinuous Cretaceous units are present in Illinois, and these are only exposed in limited areas of southern and western Illinois (Fig. 2; Willman et al., 1975). These deposits accumulated at the end of the Mesozoic owing to reactivation and subsidence along the late Proterozoic - early Paleozoic Reelfoot Rift system. This new episode of subsidence created a Cretaceous topographic low known as the Mississippi Embayment (e.g. Ervin and McGinnis, 1975, Cox and Van Arsdale, 1997, Cox et al., 2001, Garrote et al., 2006).

The McNairy Sandstone is one of these Cretaceous units, and it is exposed intermittently along the margin of the Mississippi Embayment from Mississippi north to Illinois and then southwest into Arkansas (Arkadelphia Formation; e.g. Pitakpaivan and Hazel, 1994, Becker et al., 2006a, Becker et al., 2006b). We present the first LA-ICP-MS detrital zircon U-Pb geochronologic data from the Maastrichtian McNairy Sandstone (s = 5, n = 1458) of southern Illinois, as well as the first detrital zircon study of Maastrichtian sandstones in the Mississippi Embayment, and thus provides important insight to the nature of depositional systems along the southern margin of Appalachia during the latest Cretaceous following the retreat of the Western Interior Seaway.

This work tests and refines the interpretation of Blum and Pecha (2014), which suggests a major Cretaceous drainage reorganization. Their interpretation is based on detrital zircon age spectra from Albian-Aptian (∼125–100 Ma), Cenomanian (∼94–101 Ma) and early Paleogene (∼60–65 Ma) strata of the Gulf of Mexico and Western Canada basins. They argued that Cretaceous depositional systems along the southern and western margins of Laurentia were fed by long-lived, continental wide drainage systems that headed in the Appalachian Mountains. By Paleogene time, the drainage patterns evolved to distribute water and sediment to the Gulf of Mexico. Studies by Howell et al. (2013) and Finzel (2014) support these Early Cretaceous paleogeographic interpretations. However, these studies did not incorporate the Maastrichtian rocks present in southern Illinois.

We present a more holistic understanding of the Late Cretaceous reactivation of the Reelfoot Rift and the development of the Mississippi Embayment and show that this resulted in the first south-flowing drainage in the mid-continent (i.e., the Ancestral Mississippi River). This subsidence led to the drainage reorganization and the deposition of the McNairy Sandstone, which eroded from local Pennsylvanian strata in the Illinois Basin.

Section snippets

Cretaceous stratigraphy

Cretaceous rocks are present in Alexander, Union, Johnson, Massac, Pope, and Pulaski Counties in southern Illinois and in Pike and Adams Counties in western Illinois (Fig. 2; Willman et al., 1975). The McNairy Sandstone overlies the Post Creek Formation (formerly known locally, but still known regionally as the Tuscaloosa Formation) and underlies the Owl Creek Formation (Harrison and Litwin, 1997). The Cretaceous units of southern Illinois are as thick as 150 m near Cairo, Illinois, but thin

Methodology

We use detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology to determine the provenance of the Maastrichtian McNairy Sandstone at the northern terminus of the Mississippi Embayment. U-Pb geochronology of zircons was conducted by laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) at the Arizona LaserChron Center (Gehrels et al., 2006, Gehrels et al., 2008, Gehrels and Pecha, 2014). The ages are shown on relative age-probability diagrams using the routines in Isoplot (Ludwig, 2008). Composite

Results

The McNairy detrital zircon age spectra for each of the five samples are statistically similar and include grains that are consistent with derivation from the Superior (>2.5 Ga), Penokean (1.8–1.9 Ga), Yavapai-Mazatzal (1.6–1.8 Ga), Midcontinent Granite-Rhyolite (1.3–1.5 Ga), Grenville (980–1300 Ma), and Taconic-Acadian (350–450 Ma) provinces (Fig. 4). Grenville zircons account for 74% of the grains. Taconic-Acadian grains also are important, comprising ∼10% of the age spectrum. Zircons from

Discussion

As the detrital zircon ages from the Cretaceous McNairy Sandstone and the uppermost Pennsylvanian sandstones are statistically similar, two interpretations for the McNairy Sandstones provenance are possible (Fig. 5). First, the Late Des Moinesian (Copperas Creek) and Maastrichtian (McNairy) sandstones had similar source areas in the Appalachian region, and that the geometry and dynamics of these river systems uplands did not change much in terms of dominance on the landscape and provenance over

Conclusions

The birth and early evolution of the Ancestral Mississippi River begins with renewed subsidence of the Reelfoot Rift system and the Mississippi Embayment beginning in the Cenomanian (Fig. 6). Between the Albian and the Cenomanian, much of the water and sediment flowed from the Appalachians northwest across the continent toward the Boreal Sea (Blum and Pecha, 2014, Finzel, 2014, Blum et al., 2017). However, during the Cenomanian, the advancement of the Western Interior Seaway ended the

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding, ACS PRF (55161-DNI8) grant to Potter-McIntyre. Thank you to Joe Devera from the Illinois State Geological Survey for assistance with fieldwork. We also thank the University of Arizona Laserchron Center for their assistance in the obtaining of the geochronological data. We also appreciate the rigorous and supportive suggestions from three anonymous reviewers, each of which substantially improved this paper.

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