Seminar: Collapsing oceans and rebuilding ancient mountain belts using crustal-scale 3-D geophysical models of Atlantic Canada, Iberia, Morocco, and their margins

Abstract: Atlantic Canada and its conjugate margins, the Irish, Iberian, and Moroccan margins, were subject to rifting and eventual breakup during the Mesozoic, following prior Appalachian orogenesis from the early to mid-Paleozoic. I will discuss how we can build crustal-scale 3-D geophysical models of these margins present-day using an adapted onshore-offshore 3-D constrained gravity inversion methodology and then use those models to move back in time to deformably reconstruct ocean closure, rift restoration and prior Appalachian orogenesis. This study provides the first quantitative assessment of Atlantic Canada’s crustal evolution from a contractional regime, to an extensional regime, to passive margin development, while revealing the fundamental influence of orogenic inheritance on subsequent rifting.