Award Date

12-1991

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Geoscience

Department

Geoscience

First Committee Member

six

Second Committee Member

six

Third Committee Member

six

Number of Pages

152

Abstract

In the Hidden Valley area of the north-central McCullough Mountains, southern Nevada, mid-Miocene andesite and dacite domes, flows and pyroclastic units (the Sloan volcanics) partially fill a sag in the underlying Hidden Valley volcanics. The 13.5 km diameter sag formed during and/or after the eruption of the Sloan volcanics. Sagging was accommodated by a combination of movement on the McCullough Wash fault system, and subsidence into evacuated chambers.

Major, trace and rare-earth element geochemistry suggests that the rocks of the Sloan volcanics belong to four groups, each of which were produced by partial melting of chemically distinct sources. With the exception of the Center Mountain dome complex, magmas rose rapidly without significant crystal fractionation or crustal contamination.

The Mount Hanna andesite member of the Sloan volcanics erupted as a hot, dry aphyric lava by a mechanism of fire-fountaining from a depth of up to 25 km, precluding a Plinian-style ash-flow event. Eruptions of felsic-to-intermediate lavas by a lava-fountaining event have been described in other areas, but the Mount Hanna andesite represents the first documentation of such an eruption in the southern Basin-and-Range.

Keywords

Geochemistry; Miocene Geologic Epoch; Nevada – Hidden Valley; Nevada – Mount Hanna; Volcanic ash; tuff; etc.

Disciplines

Geochemistry | Geology | Volcanology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Comments

Best copy available

Incomplete paper data

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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