Abstract Hudson Bay Lithospheric Experiment (HuBLE) was designed to understand the processes that formed Laurentia and the Hudson Bay basin within it. Receiver function analysis shows that Archaean terranes display structurally simple, uniform thickness, felsic crust. Beneath the Palaeoproterozoic Trans-Hudson Orogen (THO), thicker, more complex crust is interpreted as evidence for a secular evolution in crustal formation from non-plate-tectonic in the Palaeoarchaean to fully developed plate tectonics by the Palaeoproterozoic. Corroborating this hypothesis, anisotropy studies reveal 1.8 Ga plate-scale THO-age fabrics. Seismic tomography shows that the Proterozoic mantle has lower wavespeeds than surrounding Archaean blocks; the Laurentian keel thus formed partly in post-Archaean times. A mantle transition zone study indicates ‘normal’ temperatures beneath the Laurentian keel, so any cold mantle down-welling associated with the regional free-air gravity anomaly is probably confined to the upper mantle. Focal mechanisms from earthquakes indicate that present-day crustal stresses are influenced by glacial rebound and pre-existing faults. Ambient-noise tomography reveals a low-velocity anomaly, coincident with a previously inferred zone of crustal stretching, eliminating eclogitization of lower crustal rocks as a basin formation mechanism. Hudson Bay is an ephemeral feature, caused principally by incomplete glacial rebound. Plate stretching is the primary mechanism responsible for the formation of the basin itself.

Abstract Analysis of several types of seismic and potential field geophysical data consistently indicate that the majority of the crust underlying the Canadian Cordillera and much of western Canada was originally Proterozoic sedimentary rocks shed off the Canadian Shield into rift or basin structures between 1.84 and 0.54 Ga. These variably metamorphosed strata were primarily quartz- and limestone-rich sediments and thus have distinctive geophysical signatures because of their lower density, lower magnetization, and lower Poisson’s ratio compared with more mafic rocks. The sediments formed a prograding wedge that has a distinctive, internally reflective, seismic stratigraphy. In the east, these Proterozoic sedimentary rocks thicken at a ‘hinge line’ defined by the margin of the pre-1.84 Ga crystalline basement of the Canadian Shield; previous work mapped this hinge line locally using deep reflection profiles and regionally using distinctive gravity gradients. Here we assemble previously published results of several geophysical methods to define the overall shape of the wedge along the margin and westward to where it pinches out at the modern Moho beneath the crustal collage of exotic and suspect terranes accreted onto North America during the Mesozoic. The volume of crust occupied by this wedge limits the thickness of most accreted terranes to several kilometres and suggests that deeper portions of the accreted blocks detached or underthrust the wedge during accretion and are no longer contiguous to crust exposed at the surface. This type Cenozoic accretionary orogen thus spent most of its prior geological history as a passive or extensional margin punctuated by only a few, brief convergent or accretionary events.

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