Papers about the Rocky Mountains, western United States:
11. Bird, P. [1979] Continental delamination and the Colorado Plateau, J. Geophys. Res., 84, 7561-7571.
20. Bird, P. [1984] Laramide crustal thickening event in the Rocky Mountain foreland and Great Plains, Tectonics, 3, 741-758.
22. Bird, P. [1988] Formation of the Rocky Mountains, western United States: a continuum computer model, Science, 239, 1501-1507.
27. Bird, P. [1991] Lateral extrusion of lower crust from under high topography, in the isostatic limit, J. Geophys. Res., 96, 10,275- 10,286.
N.B. Most will prefer to quote paper (22) above regarding the dynamic finite-element test of the Dickinson & Snyder hypothesis for the formation of the Rockies, because Science is well-known and widely available. However, the dynamic F-E model (using program Laramy) was upgraded in several ways for follow-up paper (28) below: (a) use of reconstructed Farallon and Kula plates in the bottom boundary conditions; (b) inclusion of a coastal cordillera in the Cretaceous as an initial condition; and (c) computation up to the present, instead of stopping at 30 Ma. Also, the web page below gives access to an electronic atlas of over a hundred maps derived from the preferred model.
28. Bird, P. [1992] Deformation and uplift of North America in the Cenozoic era, in: K. R. Billingsley, H. U. Brown, III, and E. Derohanes (eds.), Scientific Excellence in Supercomputing: the IBM 1990 Contest Prize Papers, Baldwin Press, Athens, Georgia, v. 1, pp. 67-105.
32. Bird, P. [1994] Isotopic evidence for preservation of Cordilleran lithospheric mantle during the Sevier-Laramide orogeny, western United States: Comment, Geology, 22 (7), 670-671.
N.B. While papers (20), (22), and (28) above presented forward or dynamic F-E models of the Laramide orogeny, paper (40) below takes a different approach and presents an inverse or kinematic model, based on structural geology and paleomagnetism. Both are F-E models, and both sets of results are ultimately interpreted as supporting the Dickinson & Snyder hypothesis of horizontal subduction as the primary cause for the Laramide orogeny, but the assumptions and methods of these two studies are completely different.
40. Bird, P. [1998b] Kinematic history of the Laramide orogeny in latitudes 35° -49° N, western United States, Tectonics, 17, 780-801.
45. Bird, P. [2002] Stress-direction history of the western United States and Mexico since 85 Ma, Tectonics, 21, 10.1029/2001TC001319.
58. Bird, P. [2009] Long-term fault slip rates, distributed deformation rates, and forecast of seismicity in the western United States from joint fitting of community geologic, geodetic, and stress direction data sets, J. Geophys. Res., 114(B11), B11403, doi:10.1029/2009JB006317, with electronic supplements. [N.B. This paper does not concern the formation of the Rocky Mountains, but only their neotectonic extensional phase.]