Provenance of the Antelope Mountain Quartzite, Yreka terrane, California: Evidence for large-scale late Paleozoic sinistral displacement along the North American Cordilleran margin and implications for the mid-Paleozoic fringing-arc model

The Antelope Mountain Quartzite is a coarse feldspathic siliciclastic unit in the Yreka terrane of the eastern Klamath Mountains. U-Pb geochronology of single detrital zircons from the Antelope Mountain indicates a source to the north of the 1.7-1 .8 Ga mobile belt that transects the United States. When compared to cratonic and miogeoclinal detrital zircon ages, the signature of the Antelope Mountain is most compatible with derivation from a " northern British Columbia" source. The manner in which that detritus reached its present position is explained best by catastrophic failure of the continental margin in northern British Columbia during the early Paleozoic, incorporation of olistoliths into melange of the Yreka terrane by an indeterminate amount of subduction-related transport before the Middle Devonian, and southward sinistral offset of the Yreka terrane during the late Paleozoic. This inferred tectonic transport of detritus in the Antelope Mountain Quartzite conflicts with models in which the eastern Klamath province is parautochthonous relative to the Paleozoic United States.