Laramide Orogeny

Laramide orogeny

Series of mountain-building events that affected much of western North America in Late Cretaceous and Early Tertiary time (c. 65 million years ago). The Laramide orogeny originally was believed to mark the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. It is now considered to have consisted of many separate pulses of deformation that varied in intensity and age from place to place. Laramide rocks, however, were generally created around the Cretaceous-Tertiary time boundary.

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Laramide orogeny [′lar·ə·məd ȯ′räj·ə·nē]

(geology)

Laramidian orogeny

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Laramide Orogeny 

the aggregate of geological processes in the late Cretaceous and early Paleogene periods, including tectonic deformations, magmatism, and mountain building. It is named after the Laramie range in the eastern part of the Rocky Mountains (USA), where it was the principal age of formation of the folded-overthrust structure. It also manifested itself in the Andes in South America, in the Sikhote-Alin’, western Kamchatka, the basin of the Anadyr’ River, and in a number of folded mountain systems of the alpine belt in Eurasia. There, however, it was accompanied by younger movements. Major batholithic intrusions and small granitoid bodies and the mineralization accompanying them are associated with the Laramide orogeny.