Gouiza, M orcid.org/0000-0001-5438-2698, Hall, J and Welford, JK (2017) Tectono-stratigraphic evolution and crustal architecture of the Orphan Basin during North Atlantic rifting. International Journal of Earth Sciences, 106 (3). pp. 917-937. ISSN 1437-3254
Abstract
The Orphan Basin is located in the deep offshore of the Newfoundland margin, and it is bounded by the continental shelf to the west, the Grand Banks to the south, and the continental blocks of Orphan Knoll and Flemish Cap to the east. The Orphan Basin formed in Mesozoic time during the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean between eastern Canada and western Iberia–Europe. This work, based on well data and regional seismic reflection profiles across the basin, indicates that the continental crust was affected by several extensional episodes between the Jurassic and the Early Cretaceous, separated by events of uplift and erosion. The preserved tectono-stratigraphic sequences in the basin reveal that deformation initiated in the eastern part of the Orphan Basin in the Jurassic and spread towards the west in the Early Cretaceous, resulting in numerous rift structures filled with a Jurassic–Lower Cretaceous syn-rift succession and overlain by thick Upper Cretaceous to Cenozoic post-rift sediments. The seismic data show an extremely thinned crust (4–16 km thick) underneath the eastern and western parts of the Orphan Basin, forming two sub-basins separated by a wide structural high with a relatively thick crust (17 km thick). Quantifying the crustal architecture in the basin highlights the large discrepancy between brittle extension localized in the upper crust and the overall crustal thinning. This suggests that continental deformation in the Orphan Basin involved, in addition to the documented Jurassic and Early Cretaceous rifting, an earlier brittle rift phase which is unidentifiable in seismic data and a depth-dependent thinning of the crust driven by localized lower crust ductile flow.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Passive margins; Rift basins; Tectonics; Sedimentation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Institute for Applied Geosciences (IAG) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 17 Jun 2016 15:46 |
Last Modified: | 19 Feb 2018 22:47 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s00531-016-1341-0 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s00531-016-1341-0 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:100986 |