Definition and Characteristics
The term chaos was first formally used by Noble (1941) to describe the structural nature of an extensive sheet of brecciated Late Precambrian and Lower Paleozoic sedimentary rocks in the southern Death Valley region, California. These sedimentary rocks are brecciated on a cyclopean scale and lie above a planar to broadly undulating fault surface. Noble described the chaotic nature of the breccia as follows:
The arrangement of the blocks is confused and disordered—chaotic.
The blocks, though mostly too small to map, are vastly larger than those in anything that could be called a breccia; most of them are more than 200 feet in length, some are as much as a quarter of a mile, and a few are more than half a mile in length.
They are tightly packed together, not separated by much fine-grained material.
Each block is bounded by surfaces of movement—in other words, each is a fault block.
Each block is minutely fractured throughout, yet the original bedding in...
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References
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© 1987 Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc.
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Burchfiel, B.C. (1987). Chaos structure . In: Structural Geology and Tectonics. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31080-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31080-0_11
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