Cambrian to Silurian Basin Development and Sedimentation, North Greenland

Abstract

The Franklinian Basin extended from northern Ellesmere Island across North Greenland, where its sedimentary infill is exposed from Inglefield Land and Washington Land in the west to Kronprins Christian Land in the east (Fig. 7.1–7.3). The segment of the basin exposed in North Greenland is approximately 800 km long and has a maximum preserved north-south width of 200 km. The thickness of the sedimentary column reaches about 8 km; the main part of the succession is of Cambrian-Silurian age, but it may extend down into the latest Precambrian and up into the earliest Devonian. A distinction into a shelf sequence and deep water trough sequence can be recognized in northern Ellesmere Island and in North Greenland, and the variations in facies with time in the two regions show close parallels. Correlation on group or formation level is often possible across Nares Strait (Peel and Christie, 1982; Peel et al., 1982). Detailed knowledge of the North Greenland sequences, however, permits an integrated account of shelf and trough development in the North Greenland segment of the Franklinian Basin. A craton composed of Archean and Upper Proterozoic crystalline basement rocks, overlain by Middle and Upper Proterozoic sedimentary and volcanic rocks, lies to the south of the Franklinian Basin (Chapter 6). This is now exposed intermittently along the margin of the Inland Ice, and more extensively in eastern North Greenland (Fig. 7.1). In the early Paleozoic, this craton was fringed to the north by an east-west trending shallow marine shelf, Two main facies belts

Discrimination of sedimentary lithologies using Hyperion and Landsat Thematic Mapper data: a case study at Melville Island, Canadian High Arctic

“…Bedrock units in the study area (figure 2; table 1) consist mainly of late-Paleozoic clastic and carbonate formations of the Sverdrup Basin (Trettin 1991, Goodbody and Christie 1994, Harrison 1995. Also present are Silurian carbonates of the shelf province of the Franklinian Mobile Belt (Higgins et al 1991, Trettin 1991, Harrison 1994b, and a near-vertical Cretaceous gabbro dike (Harrison 1995). North-dipping cuesta landforms dominate the low-relief terrain (figure 3), and elevations in the region mainly range from 0 to ,200 m above sea level.…”

Precambrian–Palaeozoic geology of Smith Sound, Canada and Greenland: key constraint to palaeogeographic reconstructions of northern Laurentia and the North Atlantic region

“…The cross‐section along the seaway (Fig. 6) illustrates that the thin cover over a structural basement high comprises distal parts of two sedimentary prisms of different age and opposing geometry: Mesoproterozoic strata thicken south over the faulted margin into the trough of the Thule Basin (Dawes, 1997) while Palaeozoic strata thicken to the north‐west from inner to outer shelf and from slope to trough of the Franklinian Basin (Higgins et al. , 1991; Trettin et al.…”

“…Geological harmony and mismatch are defined by Archean, Palaeoproterozoic, Mesoproterozoic, Neoproterozoic and Palaeozoic provinces. Geology from Dawes and Kerr (1982a), Higgins et al (1991), Trettin et al (1991), de Freitas and Nowlan (1998), Jackson (2000), St-Onge et al (2006) and Nutman et al (2008). Sverdrup Basin (Upper Palaeozoic-Palaeogene) deposits and ice cover are not shown.…”

“…Geological harmony and mismatch are defined by Archean, Palaeoproterozoic, Mesoproterozoic, Neoproterozoic and Palaeozoic provinces. Geology from Dawes and Kerr (1982a), Higgins et al. (1991), Trettin et al.…”

The oldest hyolithids (Cambrian Series 2, Montezuman Stage) from the Iapetan margin of Laurentia

“…1.3). The Lagerstätte is known only from a single locality, but the siliciclastic sediments of the Buen Formation are otherwise widely distributed in eastern North Greenland (Higgins et al, 1991a, b; Ineson and Peel, 1997, 2011; Peel and Willman, 2018; Fig. 1.1).…”