Late cretaceous and tertiary history and the dynamic crushing of cobbles, black butte area, southwestern Montana

Black Butte is an early Miocene basaltic volcanic neck that forms a prominent landmark as the highest peak of the Gravelly Range, southwestern Montana. The intrusion cuts mid-Cenozoic and older sedimentary rocks near the eastern margin of the Overthrust Belt.

After erosional removal of the Late Cretaceous Frontier Formation, quartzite-rich detritus from ultimate sources probably far to the west was deposited in the area and now forms a diamicton that rests on striated bedrock. This unit, previously interpreted as a till and as a mudflow deposit, probably represents Upper Cretaceous or lower Tertiary, syntectonic alluvial-fan sediments. These were deposited after the Gravelly Arch had begun to rise and were deformed during overthrusting from the west or possibly during mass movement as the basal part of a landslide.

Scattered cobbles of hard quartzite in the diamicton are crushed. If this crushing occurred within aggregates of coarse clasts that were momentarity in point contact with one another, it does notrequire either overthrusting or mass movement of extremely thick depositional overburden. But if a major thrust sheet did move over the diamicton, the leading edge of the Overthrust Belt must extend considerably further east of where it is currently recognized in this area.

Volcanic and volcaniclastic rocks were deposited in the area throughout much or all of Oligocene time. These include tuffaceous mudstone as much as 265 m thick that contains vertebrate fossils of Chadronian through Whitneyan age. The KAr age of biotite in an airfall tuff within this section at nearby Lion Mountain is 31.4 Ma, and the KAr age of an alkaline basaltic flow at the top of the Lion Mountain section is 30.8 Ma. These tuffaceous rocks and basalt on Lion Mountain correlate with volcaniclastics in Wyoming and as far east as Nebraska and the Dakotas.

Eruptions at Black Butte, dated previously at 22.9 Ma, begun with phreatomagmatic explosions that deposited tuff across an irregular topographic surface cut in the section of tuffaceous mudstone into which the Black Butte plug was emplaced. The alkali basalt magma differentiated to yield the relatively rare rock typetephritic phonolite during fractional crystallization and segregation in situ of potassic late liquids.

Lava flows from Black Butte and the nearby Lion Mountain volcanic center may have covered much of this part of the Gravelly Range but have been mostly removed owing to erodability of the thick blanket of mudstone on which they rested.

Removal of mudstone that contained the Black Butte intrusion involved massive slumping. Mass movement of the diamicton beneath the mudstone is occurring today as an earthflow down the west-dipping structural and topographic slope of the range.