Late Cenozoic sedimentation and volcanism during transtensional deformation in Wingate Wash and the Owlshead Mountains, Death Valley

The contact between the southern Panamint domain and the adjacent domains is a complex fault system that we interpret as a zone of Late Miocene distributed sinistral slip that is variably overprinted in different portions of the mapped area. The net sinistral slip across the Wingate Wash fault system is estimated at 7-9 km, based on offset of Proterozoic Crystal Springs Formation beneath the middle Miocene unconformity to as much as 15 km based on offset volcanic facies in Middle Miocene rocks. To the south of Wingate Wash, the northern Owlshead Mountains are also cut by a sinistral, northwest-dipping, oblique normal fault, (referred to as the Filtonny Fault) with significant slip that separates the Lower Wingate Wash and central Owlshead domains. The Filtonny Fault may represent a young conjugate fault to the dextral Southern Death Valley fault system and may be the northwest-dipping fault imaged by COCORP studies. Similarly, younger deformation in upper Wingate Wash is probably broadly related to distributed dextral shear along the Panamint Valley fault system. Earlier deformation (Late Miocene?) is more difficult to constrain because of overprinting but appears to be dominated by an E-W extension recognized by a NNW-striking, northeast-dipping, sinistral-oblique normal faults, ∼N-S striking normal faults that splay in the northern Owlshead Mountains and include the large west-tilted fault blocks of the northern Owlshead Mountains.