Variscan orogeny rifted off the north Gondwana margin in early Ordovician. By the end of the Silurian and in Early Devonian times, Baltica and Laurentia drifted towards each other, closing the Iapetus Ocean between them. They collided in the Caledonian orogeny and formed the Caledonide mountains of North America, Greenland, the British Isles and Norway. Seafloor spreading to the south of Avalonia pushed the latter into north Laurentia and thrust up the northern Appalachian Mountains in the acadian phase of the Caledonian orogeny. Contemporaneously the Tornquist Sea between Avalonia and Baltica was entirely closed. Thus Avalonia formed the southern coast of the
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