Ouachita orogeny Ouachita orogeny The Ouachita orogeny was a mountain building event that resulted in the folding and faulting of strata currently exposed in the Ouachita Mountains. The more extensive Ouachita system extends from the current range in Arkansas and Oklahoma southeast to the Black Warrior Basin in Alabama and to the southwest through the Llano, Marathon, and Solitario uplifts in Texas on into Coahuila and Chihuahua in Mexico. The region during the early Paleozoic lay off the coast of the southern portion of Laurentia, in what is now the southern United States. Laurentia straddled the equator at the time and the
Andean orogeny of the supercontinent Rodinia in the Neoproterozoic. The Paleozoic Pampean, Famatinian and Gondwanan orogenies are the immediate precursors to the later Andean orogeny. The first phases of Andean orogeny in the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous were characterized by extensional tectonics, rifting, the development of back-arc basins and the emplacement of large batholiths. This development is presumed to have been linked to the subduction of cold oceanic lithosphere. During the mid to Late Cretaceous (ca. 90 million years ago) the Andean orogeny changed significantly in character. Warmer and younger oceanic lithosphere is believed to have started to be subducted beneath South