Lower Permian Dry Mountain Trough, Eastern Nevada: Preliminary Basin Analysis

David L. Schwarz, Walter S. Snyder, Claude Spinosa

The Lower Permian Dry Mountain trough (DMT) is one of several basins that developed during the Late Pennsylvanian to Permian along the western edge of the North American continent. A tectonic mechanism has been suggested for the subsidence of the DMT, possibly due to reactivation of the Antler orogenic belt during the waning stages of Ancestral Rocky Mountain deformation.

The DMT records marked subsidence with the appearance during the Artinskian (latest Wolfcampian) of a deeper water facies that consists of thin-bedded silty micrites and micritic mudstones rich in radiolarians and sponge spicules, characterized by a relative abundance of ammonoids, and rarer conodonts and Nereites ichnofacies trace fossils. Taxa recovered from a distinctive concretionary horizon at various locations provide an Artinskian datum on which to palinspastically reconstruct the DMT paleogeography. These taxa include ammonoids: Uraloceras, Medlicottia, Marathonites, Crimites, Metalegoceras, "properrinitids"; and conodonts: Neogondolella bisselli, Sweetognathus whitei, S. behnkeni, and Diplognathodus stevensi.

The western margin facies of the DMT consists of Permian Carbon Ridge/Garden Valley Formations. Here, lowermost black Artinskianage euxinic micrites, considered a potential source rock for petroleum generation, are overlain by base-of-slope carbonate apron deposits, which, in turn, are overlain by a thick, eastwardly prograding conglomerate wedge. Seismic profiles across Diamond Valley indicate a 3.0-4.6-km thick Tertiary sequence above the Paleozoic strata.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91040©1987 AAPG Rocky Mountain Section Meeting, Boise, Idaho, September 13-16, 1987.