Far-field tectonic effects of the High Arctic Eurekan Orogeny from an indenting Greenland plate during the Paleogene

The Eurekan Orogeny relates to the tectonic impact of Greenland as an independent lithospheric plate indenting the High Arctic during the Paleocene-Eocene. While the emphasis to date has been on the High Arctic land geology, we highlight marine geophysical evidence for distal tectonic effects to the north: 1) 400 km north of Ellesmere Island, where the elevated southern end of the Lomonosov Ridge reveals flanking local sediment accumulations (<200 m thick, >35 km wide) at two Paleocene/Eocene stratigraphic levels which suggest discrete episodes of plateau uplift and erosion; 2) north of Greenland, where the Morris Jesup Rise (300 km long, 180 km wide) is formed by a stack of deformed sediments and volcanics; 3) north of Svalbard, where a north-trending continental basement block (>200 km long, 80 km wide) of the Yermak Plateau was affected by northeast directed thrusting. The indenting Greenland plate caused tectonic deformation distributed over a +300 km wide zone east and northeast of Greenland. In the Queen Elizabeth islands, west-directed extrusion of elongated crustal blocks was conditioned by crustal-scale N-S folds represented by formation of the Princess Margareth and Cornwall arches.