INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN THE TECTONOMORPHIC HISTORY OF THE ARCTIC AND ITS PAST ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES Part I: Cenozoic tectonothermal evolution of North and Northeast Greenland
Final Report Abstract
For this project, we investigated the formation of the high-Arctic Eurekan Orogen, and its dissection in the course of the opening of the northern North Atlantic. Our study area was located in the core segment of the Eurekan Belt in northern and eastern North Greenland, and – across the Fram Strait – along the western coast of Spitsbergen. Our data revealed that the Eurekan Belt experienced episodic exhumation during the Palaeocene, the early and middle Eocene, and during the early Oligocene, in agreement with other segments of the Eurekan Belt in Canada and Svalbard. Exhumation was presumably mostly controlled by strike-slip movements along a large continental transform fault system, the De Geer Fault Zone (DGFZ). According to our structural model, movements along the DGFZ were not restricted to eastern North Greenland, as previously thought, but cut across and beyond North Greenland. The main period of topography formation was presumably the middle Eocene, when sedimentary basins filled during earlier stages of the Eurekan became inverted and involved in Eurekan tectonics, coeval with first indications for continental ice formation in the offshore record. The faults of the DGFZ also served as pathways for heat and presumably fluid transport, which caused several “thermal events” along the (future) North Atlantic coasts. Reactivation of these thermally weakened zoned paved the way for the dissection of the Eurekan, finally leading to continental breakup and opening of the northern North Atlantic. Our results support recent studies that emphasize the importance of continental transform faults and inheritance for passive margin formation.
Publications
-
Shallow Thermal Anomalies and Their Role in the Breakup Evolution Along the Conjugate Margins of the Fram Strait (Svalbard and Eastern North Greenland), Indicated by Low‐Temperature Thermochronology. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 25(3).
Meier, Katrin; O’Sullivan, Paul; Jochmann, Malte M.; Wallrath, Tino; Monien, Patrick; Piepjohn, Karsten; Lisker, Frank & Spiegel, Cornelia
