| Abstract |
- Four distinct lithologic units compose the Tertiary rocks of the Neahkahnie Mountain - Angora Peak area, located along the northwest
Oregon coast near the town of Nehalem. The Tertiary units are the late Oligocene to early Miocene Oswald West mudstones, the middle Miocene Angora Peak sandstone member of the Astoria Formation, and middle Miocene intrusive and extrusive rocks of the Depoe Bay Basalt. These units are unconformably overlain by Pleistocene and Recent beach and dune sands, alluvium, and tidal flat muds. The Oswald West mudstones and the Angora Peak sandstone member are informal stratigraphic units proposed in this study. The Oswald West mudstones consist of over 1600 feet of well-bedded, highly burrowed, tuffaceous siltstones and silty mudstones interbedded with minor amounts of graded turbidite sandstones and submarine slump deposits. Foraminifera and trace fossils suggest
deposition occurred in marine waters of upper bathyal depths. The Angora Peak sandstone consists of over 1800 feet of thin- to
thick-bedded, locally cross-bedded, fine- to coarse-grained arkosic sandstones, pumiceous and basaltic conglomerates, carbonaceous
and micaceous siltstones, and local coal beds. The inter-fingering shallow marine and fluvial sandstones are interpreted to have been deposited in a high-energy, wave dominated, deltaic environment which reworked the sediments into extensive delta-front sheet sands similar to those observed in the modern Niger and Rhone deltas. Mineralogy, heavy minerals, and conglomerate clast lithologies indicate that most of the sediments were derived from local uplifted areas of Eocene basalts and early Tertiary sediments and from the Oligocene Little Butte Volcanics in the western Cascades. Rare metamorphic and plutonic clasts, sedimentary quartzite, heavy minerals, and sandstone mineralogy suggest that metamorphic, igneous, and Paleozoic sedimentary terranes in eastern Oregon and Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, and Montana supplied some of the sediments, possibly via an ancestral Columbia River. Dikes, sills, and plugs of aphanitic to finely crystalline Depoe Bay Basalt intrude the older sedimentary rocks and locally are feeders for palagonitized pillow breccias which unconformably overlie the Angora Peak sandstone. The major intrusive body is a 1200-foot thick diabasic sill referred to as the Neahkahnie sill. The extrusive basalts formed in a subsiding marine basin in which over 1600 feet of pillow lavas, pillow breccias, and minor basalt flows were locally extruded. The area is cut by a series of west-northwest and north-trending faults. Two synclines and an anticline strike subparallel to the west-northwest trending faults.
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