Taconic Orogeny in Pennsylvania: A 15 –20 m.y. Apennine-style Ordovician event viewed from its Martic hinterland

In Pennsylvania, the Taconic Orogeny lasted from 461 to 443 Ma as Cambro-Ordovician slope deposits were deformed into mountains edging the Laurentian craton at the same time that materials from an adjacent deep-water basin were being transported 50 –70 km across a carbonate platform into foreland basins. This paper focuses on shelf-edge hinterland features, mostly the Martic Zone as a folded, stack of imbricate thrust sheets of slope materials that corresponds to Vermont's Taconic Mountains and Southern Quebec's zone of Taconic allochthons. Work of the last century is summarized, corrected, and combined with a new 450 Ma radiometric date and fluid inclusion data from the Pequea Mine within the Martic Zone. These and abundant new graptolite and conodont dates in the foreland paint a revised Pennsylvania picture differing from the northern Taconic areas. Differences are: (1) transport of very large allochthonous masses of deep-water material, the Dauphin Formation, far across the carbonate platform, and (2) deformation migrating progressively across that platform during a 15 –20 m.y. period, incorporating it and its foreland cover into alpine-scale, recumbent folds and thrusts. The scenario has many analogies to Italy's modern Apennine Mountains minus the Latian volcanics.