Southeast Baffin volcanic margin and the North American Greenland plate separation

Abstract

Plate breakup over plumes is characterized by the development of margins showing extensive magma production both underplated at Moho level and extruded as thick piles of seaward dipping lava formations. The Disko-Svartenhuk area in west Greenland is one of the few places in the world with exposed seaward dipping basalts forming a prism whose thickness increases seaward. We present a quantitative tectonic study of this margin, which we tentatively restored in its geodynamic position during the different stages of plate separation between Greenland and North America. Our structural data are constrained with recently published 39 Ar/ 40 Ar and new and coherent 40 K/ 40 Ar geochronology in dikes of different orientations. The first-order structure is that of a tectonically-driven seaward crustal flexure linked to definitive plate breakup between Greenland and Baffin Island during the Eocene, coeval with the formation of the upper part of the exposed seaward dipping volcanic prism. This flexing is associated with a significant crustal stretching associated with arrays of continentward dipping normal faults. This across-strike structure is correlated to a fundamental along-strike segmentation with the three "segments" adopting a "zigzag" strike. There is a clear increase of extensional strain at the extremities of the segments. Eocene extension trended N060 on average in the northern and southern segments but was NW trending in the central NE trending Nugssuaq segment. We discuss the interpretation of such an extension perpendicular to the different margin segments. From a regional point of view the N060 extension is distinct in orientation from the approximately N-S trend of plate separation between North America and Greenland in the Baffin Bay during the Eocene. However, the extension recorded in the margin is nearly perpendicular to the obliquely spreading Eocene accretion axis in the Baffin Bay. This latter point suggests a mantle or ridge control of the development of the margin over regional far-field lithospheric stress models.