Significance of northeast-trending features in Canada Basin, Arctic Ocean

• Published in: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems
• Main Authors: Hutchinson, Deborah R., Jackson, H. Ruth, Houseknecht, David, Li, Qingmou, Shimeld, John W., Mosher, David C., Chian, Deping, Saltus, Richard W., Oakey, Gordon N.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley & Sons 2017
• Subjects: Canada Basin; Tectonics; Arctic Ocean; Strike slip; Seafloor spreading; Arctic; Canada; Chukchi Borderland; Northwind Escarpment; Sever; Sever Spur; canada basin; Chukchi; Extended Continental Shelf Project; Alaska
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/9464

© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 18 (2017): 4156–4178, doi:10.1002/2017GC007099. Synthesis of seismic velocity, potential field, and geological data from Canada Basin and its surrounding continental margins suggests that a northeast-trending structural fabric has influenced the origin, evolution, and current tectonics of the basin. This structural fabric has a crustal origin, based on the persistence of these trends in upward continuation of total magnetic intensity data and vertical derivative analysis of free-air gravity data. Three subparallel northeast-trending features are described. Northwind Escarpment, bounding the east side of the Chukchi Borderland, extends ∼600 km and separates continental crust of Northwind Ridge from high-velocity transitional crust in Canada Basin. A second, shorter northeast-trending zone extends ∼300 km in northern Canada Basin and separates inferred continental crust of Sever Spur from magmatically intruded crust of the High Arctic Large Igneous Province. A third northeast-trending feature, here called the Alaska-Prince Patrick magnetic lineament (APPL) is inferred from magnetic data and its larger regional geologic setting. Analysis of these three features suggests strike slip or transtensional deformation played a role in the opening of Canada Basin. These features can be explained by initial Jurassic-Early Cretaceous strike slip deformation (phase 1) followed in the Early Cretaceous (∼134 to ∼124 Ma) by rotation of Arctic Alaska with seafloor spreading orthogonal to the fossil spreading axis preserved in the central Canada Basin (phase 2). In this model, the Chukchi Borderland is part of Arctic Alaska. Funding for this work was provided in part through the Geological Survey of Canada as part of Canada’s UNCLOS Project and through the U.S. Geological Survey as part of the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf project.