Penrose Conference on 'Tectonic Development of the Canada Basin, Arctic Ocean'

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This award provides participant support funds for a Penrose Conference on the tectonic development of the Arctic Ocean Basin. Penrose conferences are sponsored by the Geological Society of America and they are intended to bring together researchers at critical junctures in the development of scientific thinking in fields of geology and geophysics. The title of this conference is "The Tectonic Development of the Canada Basin and Surrounding Regions", and it will be held September 28-October 3, 1995. The tectonic history of the Arctic region is still extremely controversial and of great importance not only to our understanding of global tectonics, but also to understanding the framework of the known and conjectured oil and mineral resources of the Arctic. The movement of the tectonic plates involved in evolution of the Arctic region have not all been identified, even 25 years after the plate tectonic revolution. In particular, how and when the Canada Basin section of the Arctic developed during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic is still debated in the scientific literature. The Eocene to recent evolution of the Arctic Ocean was thought to be reasonably straightforward, consisting of identified seafloor spreading along the Nansen-Gakkel Ridge in the Eurasian Basin. But now, recent field work indicates that some of the Cenozoic seafloor spreading motion in the Eurasian Basin was transformed into the Canada Basin. Similarly, recent analyses of ERS-1 satellite derived gravity data over the Arctic Ocean to 84 N have added new information, some of it relating directly to the controversy concerning the origin of the Canada Basin. At the present time, the various groups that work on the many different aspects of the Arctic tend to work independently of one another, and attend different national and international meetings. Therefore, substantial progress could be made in the understanding of Arctic tectonics by bringing together the key scientists from these groups to integrat e studies based on terrestrial geology and geophysics around the margin of the Arctic, marine geological and geophysical studies, and aeromagnetic, aerogravity and satellite data. In addition, the Russian data that were not available to western scientists until recently, need to be incorporated into the tectonic models for the Arctic, along with new data obtained through joint research undertaken between Russian scientists, and scientists from Germany, U.S. and Canada. This meeting is an opportunity to advance understanding of the present geological and geophysical knowledge of the Arctic, and to plan coordinated and cooperative future work in the Arctic.