Tectonic plate fragmentation models for deformable plate reconstructions: applications to the margins of the southern North Atlantic

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The margins of the southern North Atlantic Ocean host many of the world's most promising frontier regions for oil and gas exploration, with the Newfoundland and Labrador margins showing the most promise and success to date. Understanding how these regions evolved over geological time is crucial for answering fundamental scientific questions about the rifting of continents, for deciphering how our existing resource discoveries were emplaced, and also for identifying future areas with exploration potential. With the benefit of computational advances, geoscientists can now quantitatively take our current Earth models back through time to their origins. Using deformable plate reconstruction software packages (e.g., GPlates), this project will allow the evolution of the southern North Atlantic Ocean to be sped back through time to the supercontinent of Pangaea, with a level of detail never achieved before. In this way, the opening of the oceans and the formation of key sedimentary basins can be studied both spatially and temporally as they develop. The fragmented tectonic plate models of the margins derived in this study will be used to generate the most realistic plate reconstructions to-date. In addition to contributing to our increasing knowledge of tectonic processes and their importance to industry and Canada's resource economy, the researchers trained during this project will be well poised to continue on as academic researchers or to become knowledgeable technical leaders in industry both in Canada and abroad.