"Extending from Colorado, USA, on the north to the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, on the south, the Rio Grande rift divides the Colorado Plateau on the west from the interior of the North American craton on the east. This volume focuses on the Rio Grande rift's upper crustal basins and is organized geographically with study areas progressing from north to south. Nineteen chapters cover a variety of topics, including sedimentation history, rift basin geometries and the influence of older structure on rift basin evolution, faulting and strain transfer within and among basins, relations of magmatism to rift tectonism, and basin hydrogeology"--Provided by publisher.

This multi-author book has been prepared by an international group of geoscientists that have been active in rift research since the late 1960s. In 1984, an informal, grass-roots study group was initiated to compare individual research results and to explore in greater depth the apparent differences and similarities in the interpretations from various rift systems. The group became known as the CREST working group, an acronym of Continental Rifts: Evolution, Structure and Tectonics, which not surprisingly became the title of this book.Continental Rifts: Evolution, Structure, Tectonics presents an overview of the present state of understanding and knowledge of the processes of continental rifting from a multidisciplinary, lithospheric scale perspective. The chapters have been structured on each rift system in approximately the same synoptic sequence, so as to facilitate comparisons of rifts by the reader. The book complements its predecessors by presenting a more unified picture. It succeeds in presenting the status of a representative majority of the continental rift systems that have been at the forefront of recent research. For students and experienced researchers alike, this book will be of significant value in assessing the current state of knowledge and in serving as a framework for future research.

Silurian rocks are missing, and the Lower Devonian-Mississippian Caballos Novaculite rests unconformably on the Upper Ordovician Maravillas Formation. More than 1.4 km of flysch, from a source to the southeast, forms the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian Tesnus Formation. No Paleozoic rock younger than Early Pennsylvanian (Morrowan Series) have been found. The measured thickness of Paleozoic rocks in the Solitario is approximately 2.6 km and represents a time span of 240 m.y. with a single break of ~30 m.y. during Silurian, one of the longest depositional records known. The Paleozoic rocks found in the Solitario are allochthonous and were intensely deformed during the Ouachita Orogeny. The orogeny affected the Solitario area from Middle Pennsylvanian (Desmoinesian) until Early Permian (middle Wolfcampian). Transport of the allochton during the Ouachita Orogeny was at least tens of kilometers from the southeast.