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Franciscan Assemblage or Franciscan Complex is a geologic term for a late Mesozoic terrane of heterogeneous rocks found throughout the California Coast Ranges, and particularly on the San Francisco Peninsula. It was named by geologist Andrew Lawson, who also named the San Andreas fault that defines the western extent of the assemblage.

The Franciscan Complex is dominated by greywacke sandstones, shales and conglomerates which have experienced low-grade metamorphism. Other important lithologies include chert, basalt, limestone, serpentinite, and high-pressure, low-temperature metabasites (blueschists and eclogites) and meta-limestones. Fossils like radiolaria are found in chert beds of the Franciscan Complex. These fossils have been used to provide age constraints on the different terranes that constitute the Franciscan. The mining opportunities within the Franciscan is restricted to deposits of cinnabar and limestone.

The outcrops of the formation have a very large range, extending from Douglas County, Oregon to Santa Barbara County, California. Franciscan-like formations may be as far south as Santa Catalina Island. The formation lends its name to the term describing high-pressure regional metamorphic facies, the Franciscan facies series.

DESCRIPTION: The units of the Franciscan complex are aligned parallel to the active margin between the North American and Pacific plates. The Franciscan Complex is in contact with the Great Valley Sequence, with a continuous sheet of serpentinite at its base, along its eastern side. The type area of Franciscan rocks in San Francisco consists of metagraywackes, gray claystone and shale, thin bedded ribbon chert with abundant radiolarians, altered submarine pillow basalts (greenstone) and blueschists. Broadly, the Franciscan can be divided into two groups of rocks. Coherent terranes are internally consistent in metamorphic grade and includes folded and faulted clastic sediments, cherts and basalts, ranging from sub-metamorphic to prehnite-pumpellyite or low-temperature blueschist (jadeite-bearing) grades of metamorphism. Mélange terranes are much smaller, found between or within the larger coherent terranes and sometimes contain large blocks of metabasic rocks of higher metamorphic grade (amphibolite, eclogite, and garnet-blueschist). The mélange zones in the Franciscan usually have a block in matrix appearance with higher grade metamorphic blocks (blueschist, amphibolite, greenschist, eclogite) embedded within the mélange matrix. The matrix material of the mélanges are mudstone or serpentinite. Geologists have argued for either a tectonic or olistostormal origin. In the Northern Coast Ranges, the Franciscan has been divided into the Eastern, Central and Coastal Belts based on metamorphic age and grade, with the rocks younging and the metamorphic grade decreasing to the west. The Franciscan varies along strike, because individual accreted elements (packets of trench sediment, seamounts, etc.) did not extend the full length of the trench. Different depths of underplating, distribution of post-metamorphic faulting, and level of erosion produced the present-day surface distribution of high P/T metamorphism.



GEOLOGICAL HISTORY:

The Franciscan Complex is an assemblage of metamorphosed and deformed rocks, associated with the east dipping subduction zone at the western coast of North America. Although most of the Franciscan is Early/Late Jurassic through Cretaceous in age (150-66 Ma), some Franciscan rocks are as old as early Jurassic (180-190 Ma) age and as young as Miocene (15 Ma). The different age distribution represents the temporal and spatial variation of mechanism that operated within the subduction zone. Franciscan rocks are thought to have formed prior to the creation of the San Andreas Fault when an ancient deep-sea trench existed along the California continental margin. This trench, the remnants of which are still active in the Cascadia and Cocos subduction zone, resulted from subduction of oceanic crust of the Farallon tectonic plate beneath continental crust of the North American Plate. As oceanic crust descended beneath the continent, marine basalt and sediments were subducted and then underplated to the upper plate. This resulted in widespread deformation with the generation of thrust faults and folding, and caused high pressure-low temperature regional metamorphism. In the Miocene, the Farallon-Pacific spreading center reached the Farallon trench and the relative motion between Pacific-North America caused the initiation of the San Andreas Fault. Transform motion along the San Andreas Fault obscured and displaced the subduction related structures, resulting in overprinting of two generations of structures.