Circum-Arctic Lithosphere Evolution
CONTAINS OPEN ACCESS

Regional crustal architecture of Ellesmere Island, Arctic Canada
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Published:January 01, 2018
Abstract
New deep seismological data from Ellesmere Island and the adjacent Arctic continental margin provide new information about the crustal structure of the region. These data were not available for previous regional crustal models. This paper combines and redisplays previously published results – a gravity-derived Moho map and seismological results –to produce new maps of the Moho depth, the depth to basement and the crystalline crustal thickness of Ellesmere Island and contiguous parts of the Arctic Ocean, Greenland and Axel Heiberg Island. Northern Ellesmere Island is underlain by a thick crustal block (Moho at 41 km, c. 35 km crust). This block is separated from the Canada–Greenland craton in the south by a WSW–ENE-trending channel of thinned crystalline crust (Moho at 30–35 km, <20 km thick crust), which is overlain by a thick succession of metasedimentary and younger sedimentary rocks (15–20 km). The Sverdrup Basin in the west and the Lincoln Sea in the east interrupt the crustal architecture of central Ellesmere Island, which is interpreted to be more representative of its initial post-Ellesmerian Orogen structure, but with a later Sverdrup Basin and Eurekan overprint.
- Arctic Ocean
- Arctic region
- Atlantic Ocean
- Axel Heiberg Island
- basement
- Canada
- continental margin
- cross sections
- crust
- crystalline rocks
- deformation
- depth
- Ellesmere Island
- Ellesmerian Orogeny
- geophysical methods
- geophysical profiles
- geophysical surveys
- gravity methods
- Greenland
- intraplate processes
- kriging
- Labrador Sea
- mapping
- Mohorovicic discontinuity
- North Atlantic
- Nunavut
- Paleozoic
- Queen Elizabeth Islands
- receiver functions
- regional
- seismic methods
- seismic profiles
- statistical analysis
- surveys
- Sverdrup Basin
- Sverdrup Islands
- tectonics
- thickness
- two-dimensional models
- wide-angle methods
- Lincoln Sea