ABSTRACT: Variations in Thick Skin Structural Styles in Southern Oklahoma

BROWN, W. G., Baylor University, Waco, TX

The structural styles of the Arbuckle Mountain region of southern Oklahoma have developed as a result of the late Paleozoic Wichita and Arbuckle orogenies. The location and trends of many of these structures, however, were predetermined by the initial rifting in late Precambrian and early Cambrian during the development of the Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen. Basement-involved compressional structures occur over a wide area in southern Oklahoma, west of the thin-skinned Ouachita thrust belt. Specific sites of deformation are the Arbuckle Mountains, Tishomingo Uplift, Wichita Mountains, and Criner Hills, as well as the Ardmore and Anadarko basins. Hydrocarbons are produced from a variety of structural traps, including: (1) large double-plunging surface anticlines, (2) early formed, deep-ba in structures that are not expressed on the surface, (3) large anticlines developed under or immediately in front of major mountain overhangs, (4) anticlines that subcrop beneath the Pennsylvanian on the hanging walls of buried mountain fronts, and (5) overturned beds preserved in the footwall of major reverse faults. Controversy surrounds the interpretation of whether the major faults in the area are wrench-type, with moderate-to-large amounts of strike-slip (both left- and right-lateral), or whether they are primarily reverse dip-slip faults, displaying large amounts of crustal shortening and small amounts of lateral motion. A reinterpretation of the inferred interaction between the basement-involved structures described above, with the thin-skinned Ouachita thrust belt to the east, su gests a different sequence of deformation than generally thought.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91012©1992 AAPG Annual Meeting, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, June 22-25, 1992 (2009)