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The discovery of a new primitive microcontinent between Greenland and Canada could help scientists understand how microcontinents form.
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Researchers studied how the tectonic plates of the Davis Strait moved and eventually rifted to form the new microcontinent.
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The strait is being called a proto-microcontinent, and changes in plate motion over millions of years could have played a key factor in the creation.
You’d have to take a dip in the icy waters off the west coast of Greenland to find it, but somewhere below the surface of the Davis Strait is what scientists have declared a microcontinent.
It’s been a long time in the making.
As the tectonic plates between Canada and Greenland shifted to form the Davis Strait, which connects ocean basins the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay, the Earth’s crust reconfigured. This resulted in a thick continental crust in the ocean, now declared a newly discovered proto-microcontinent (also known as a primitive microcontinent).
In a study published in Gondwana Research, a team of researchers reconstructed the area around the Davis Strait’s plate tectonic movements from a whopping 33 to 61 million years ago, which resulted in the formation of an unusually thick slab of continental crust.
The research team says this submerged piece of crust about 12 to 15 miles long, sits offshore in Greenland’s western waters, and has been dubbed the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent.
“The well-defined changes in plate motion that occur in the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay, which have relatively limited external complications affecting them, make this area an ideal natural laboratory for studying microcontinent formation,” Jordan Phethean, a researcher working on the study, said to Phys.org.
Phethean added that the rifting required to form a microcontinent is an ongoing phenomenon, and every earthquake could play a role in the next microcontinent separation. “The aim of our work,” Phethean said, “is to understand their formation well enough to predict that very future evolution.”
When Greenland and Canada began shifting apart about 61 million years ago, the early separation started with a northeast-southwest movement of the distinct plates that coincided with the formation of the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay. About 5 million years later, plate movement switched to a more north-south movement, creating the strait and the continental crust between them.
The study of the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent and the theorizing around its formation does pave the way for understanding similar geographic structures. “Our identified mechanism of microcontinent formation may be widely applicable to other microcontinents around the globe, and further study is merited to understand the role of plate motion changes and transpression in microcontinent calving,” the researchers wrote in the study.
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