ALBERT

Description: The Brevard Fault Zone is a linear, NE-trending, gently to moderately SE-dipping fault zone traceable some 750km from Alabama to Virginia in the crystalline southern Appalachians. It ranges from 1 to 3 km wide and contains a mappable lithostratigraphy. The Brevard Fault Zone has been interpreted as a thrust, strike-slip fault (both dextral and sinistral), a suture and terrane boundary, and a fundamental crustal tectonic boundary. Deformation was partitioned in space and time, and motion was both strikeslip (dextral) and dip-slip (thrust). Early strike-slip and thrust movement was coupled to map-scale structures in the deep Inner Piedmont, late Palaeozoic dextral motion was confined to a zone of 1-3 km width, and the latest reactivation consisted of brittle thrusting confined to a zone of 100m width. The fault zone is cut by undeformed NW-trending Mesozoic dolerite dykes. The Brevard Fault Zone is characterized by the presence of a prominent retrograde (chlorite-muscovite stable) S-C fabric that indicates dextral motion. This fabric is related to late Palaeozoic (Alleghanian) dextral reactivation of the fault zone, with an unknown displacement at a time when huge volumes of fluid were fluxed through the zone. The deformation overprints an earlier (Acadian) high-temperature (garnet-staurolite-kyanite) fabric that also yields a dextral motion sense, and involved a component of thrusting. This mid-Palaeozoic deformation was coupled with west-directed, near-metamorphic peak thrusting and flow from the deep Inner Piedmont (to the east) that was buttressed against the primordial Brevard Fault Zone so that the motion became SW directed, and plastic flow became constricted in this narrow 1--3 km zone. Both of these plastic deformations were overprinted by late Alleghanian NW-directed dip-slip brittle deformation confined to the NW side of the Brevard Fault Zone. This last deformation involved at least 10 km of displacement and was related to reactivation of this block of crust as part of the late Alleghanian, NW-directed Blue Ridge-Piedmont megathrust sheet, and formed out of sequence with respect to the megathrust sheet. The Brevard Fault Zone was clearly a zone of crustal weakness that had a suitable mechanical stratigraphy that imparted sufficient anisotropy to localize the initial Acadian fault(s). Early Alleghanian fluid fluxing weakened the already strongly anisotropic fault zone and probably focused ductile reactivation at a shallower crustal depth during the early Alleghanian event. Late Alleghanian reactivation occurred even shallower as an almost discrete boundary in the brittle regime. This is one of the few faults in the Appalachians to have undergone deformational partitioning to permit multiple reactivation during Palaeozoic time.