blawn-mountain

Blawn Mountain - Geology

The Blawn Mountain Project is located in the southern Wah Wah Mountains, of the eastern Basin and Range province, in an area characterized by thick Paleozoic sedimentary section that was buried under a thick layer of regionally distributed Oligocene volcanic rocks. The igneous zone contains a large number of metallic mineral mining districts with almost two dozen associated alunite veins and replacement deposits.

Regionally there are four sets of normal faults that relate to Basin and Range block faulting. These faults generally trend west-northwest, northeast, northwest and north-south. The Blawn Wash area is a graben bounded by west-northwest and northeast faults and the bounding volcanic ridges that host the alunite mineralization.

Regional volcanism deposited a thick layer of calc-alkaline volcanic rocks across the area presently occupied by the southern Wah Wah Mountains. The Basin and Range extensional event created much of the current topography of the area by stretching the region about 40 miles westward; creating mountains with intervening valleys separated by range-bounding, normal faults that rotate at depth into a regional dĀ“ecollement. Local bimodal (calc-alkaline and basaltic) volcanism also occurred in the southern Wah Wah Mountains, associated with Basin and Range extension which began about 26 million years ago.