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The Canadian Shield is the principal area of North America where rocks of Precambrian age (i.e., those that are more than 542 million years old) are exposed at the surface. The shield was rifted apart between Canada and Greenland by seafloor spreading in the Labrador Sea and in Baffin Bay between 90 and 40 million years ago. The rift subsequently moved to the east of Greenland, forming the Reykjanes Ridge that now separates the North American plate from the European plate. The Greenland Shield is largely ice-covered. At intervals during the past 2.5 million years, the Canadian Shield was also a centre of glacial ice accumulation from which continental ice sheets advanced southward repeatedly.

The shield is an aggregate of at least four discrete continents that were fused together between about 2.0 and 1.8 billion years ago. Three of the constituent continents behaved as relatively rigid dies, called cratons, on which the adjoining cratons were molded during their mutual aggregation; the Slave craton lies to the northwest, the Nain craton to the northeast, and the Superior craton to the south of the intervening nonrigid Churchill province, which may be composite in origin. The structural grain of the cratons is truncated at their margins, suggesting that they originated by the fragmentation of larger continents that formed more than 2.6 billion years ago. Small remnant basins of essentially flat-lying Precambrian sedimentary rocks are arbitrarily included in the shield because of their age, although they have more in common structurally with the interior platform and basins.

Interior platform and basins

Nearly horizontal strata of sedimentary rocks overlie Precambrian crust that extends beyond the limits of the Canadian Shield. The sedimentary cover is less than a mile thick on the platform, but it increases to about 2.5 miles (4 km) in the Hudson Bay, Michigan, Williston, and Illinois sedimentary basins and to 4 miles (6 km) and more in troughs adjacent to the peripheral orogenic belts. The sedimentary rocks provide sensitive records of differential basement subsidence, the geomorphic evolution of the peripheral orogenic belts, fluctuations of sea level, and climatic changes related in part to latitudinal continental drift.

Paleozoic orogenic belts

Erosional remnants of ancient mountain ranges occur along the eastern, northern, and southern margins of the continent. The mountains were formed mainly between 400 and 300 million years ago, when North America collided with other continents to form the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea. The Ouachita Orogen (mountain chain) formed when the south-facing margin of North America collided with South America, the Appalachian Orogen when the southeast-facing margin collided with northwestern Africa, the Caledonian Orogen when the northeast-facing margin collided with northwestern Europe, and the Franklinian Orogen when the Arctic margin collided with crust that now underlies the Barents shelf off northern Europe and Alaska north of the Brooks Range. The portions of the orogenic belts next to the continental interior are composed mainly of folded sedimentary rocks indigenous to North America. The parts closer to the modern oceans are more diverse and include rock masses that originated outside the continent. A striking observation from paleogeographic reconstructions is that the present-day ocean basins opened along lines near the lines of closure of the preceding Paleozoic oceans.

Passive continental margins

Sediments and rocks younger than 200 million years are draped across the rifted eastern, northern, and southern margins of the continent. These rifted margins extend out under the ocean as the shallow continental shelf—an important area for fisheries—and were formed when the Atlantic and Arctic oceans and the Gulf of Mexico began to open. Rivers transported great quantities of sediment to the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean. In both areas the resulting sediments are now pierced from below by fingerlike masses of salt, called salt domes, that often are many miles in diameter. In the Arctic, sediments older than about 40 million years were crumpled during the counterclockwise rotation of Greenland as it drifted away from northeastern Canada. Sediments deposited along the Atlantic margins of North America lie mostly underwater.

Mesozoic and Cenozoic orogenic belts

The youngest mountain ranges (the Cordilleras) formed along the western margin of the continent and around the Caribbean Sea. The development of the Cordilleras occurred mainly after the Atlantic Ocean began to open and North America started drifting westward over the floor of the Pacific Ocean, about 180 million years ago. As a result, sedimentary and volcanic rocks were sheared off the Pacific Plate that was being subducted and were accreted to the leading (western) edge of the continent (so-called suspect terranes). Simultaneously, volcanic arcs formed inland of the continental margin. For about 30 million years North America has been overriding the East Pacific Rise, a centre of seafloor spreading, resulting in a fundamental segmentation of the Cordilleras. As the seafloor west of the spreading axis moves sideways (northward) relative to North America, those segments of the continental margin that have crossed the spreading ridge (i.e., California and northwestern Canada) are characterized by faults (the San Andreas and Queen Charlotte–Fairweather) with right-lateral displacements and by the absence of trenches or volcanic arcs.

The present Caribbean Sea floor originated as a submarine plateau in the eastern Pacific basin. For about 80 million years it has progressively penetrated the gap formed earlier by the separation of the North and South American plates. As the two plates (including the western Atlantic) drifted westward, subduction and arc volcanism occurred along the eastern margin of the Caribbean, and the northern and southern margins of the Caribbean were sheared and dismembered. Arc volcanism in Central America is related to subduction of the Pacific Ocean floor at the Middle America Trench off the region’s Pacific coast; it is mirrored by subduction of the Atlantic floor beneath the Lesser Antilles volcanic arc.

Cenozoic volcanic fields

Volcanism in the Cenozoic Era (i.e., roughly the past 65 million years) is related to subduction-zone processes, mantle plumes, and crustal stretching. Volcanic arcs occur in the Lesser Antilles, Central America, Mexico, the Cascade Range, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands. Vast areas of Mexico, New Mexico, and Colorado east of the main volcanic arc were blanketed by volcanic ash flows between 38 and 28 million years ago. Lines (or tracks) of volcanic activity that become older from east to west may emanate from melting sites, or hot spots, beneath the drifting continental plate. The Anahim volcanic belt of central British Columbia and the Snake River lava plain of Idaho are examples of such tracks. The Yellowstone caldera marks the active eastern end of the Snake River track. The Columbia Plateau basalts of Oregon and Washington, which are 14 to 17 million years old, resemble lava floods associated with the establishment of mantle plumes. Flood basalts in coastal and offshore eastern Greenland are related to the separation of Greenland and northwestern Europe under the influence of the Iceland mantle plume about 68 million years ago. Lavas in coastal areas of western Greenland are related to the separation of Greenland from Baffin Island. The Basin and Range Province, a vast area of crustal stretching in the western United States, contains numerous relatively small volcanic fields, mostly less than about 15 million years in age.