Alleghanian orogeny Province must have been even more intense; however, there is little evidence preserved. Rocks of Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, and Permian age are missing along the Eastern Seaboard. The mountains formed by the Alleghanian orogeny were once rugged and high, but in our time are now eroded into only a small remnant: the heavily-eroded hills of the Piedmont. Sediments that were carried eastward formed the coastal plain and part of the continental shelf. Thus, the coastal plain and Piedmont are largely the byproducts of erosion that took place from 150+ million years ago to the present. Sediments that were carried westward formed
Sonoma orogeny arcs, composed of volcanic and volcaniclastic strata and paired geotectonically with Sonoma accretionary prisms to the east, are present in the Klamath-Sierran region of the Cordilleran orogen to the south of volcanic cover in the Pacific Northwest. Burchfiel and Davis presented a detailed model relating the Sonoma orogeny to convergent plate tectonic processes. They postulated an east-dipping subduction zone beneath a magmatic arc to the west of the continent. In this scheme, a back-arc basin floored by oceanic crust lay between the arc and the continent. The Sonoma orogeny involved closure of this basin and a process by which the