Terrane sutures in the Maine Appalachians,USA and adjacent areas

Terrane sutures in the Maine Appalachians and adjacent areas are recognized as melange dominated, deformed accretionary prisms of Ordovician age, and as a broad synmetamorphic transcurrent fault zone of probable Late Silurian-Early Devonian age. Although the accretionary prisms are associated with present day aeromagnetic and Bouguer gravity anomalies, they are probably not associated with present day crustal penetrating boundaries. The geology of the accretionary prisms indicates subduction-obduction dominated regimes during which (1) the Gander and Boundary Mountain (Dunnage) terranes amalgamated and (2) the composite Boundary Mountain-Gander terrane accreted to the Laurentian margin. The Penobscottian orogeny produced and deformed the older of the two accretionary prisms. This accretionary prism indicates that the Penobscottian was a continuous or perhaps diachronous event which spanned the late Cambrian to early Late Ordovician. The younger accretionary prism was produced and deformed during the Taconian orogeny during late Middle to early Late Ordovician. Initial deformation of this accretionary prism may have overlapped the waning stages of the Penobscottian. Portions of the Taconian arc locally overlie the Penobscottian accretionary prism. A synmetamorphic fault zone lies within Precambrian(?) to Ordovician(?) bimodal metavolcanic and metapelitic rocks assigned here to the Avalon terrane. This zone is several kilometres wide and is interpreted to be the postsubduction suture between the Avalon and Gander terranes, and may, in part, represent a fossil transform fault system. The fault zone contains phyllonites as well as shear zones which generally record dextral motion. The phyllonites were previously interpreted as a stratigraphic unit, whereas the shear zones span or are contained within mappable compositional units. Formation of and movement along these phyllonites and shear zones ceased before the intrusion of Early Devonian plutons. Not all faults in south-western Maine are related to the suture. Younger dip and/or strike-slip and thrust faults are approximately parallel to, or may lie within, the older shear zones and they complicate the recognition of the older faults.