Infrastructure and evolution of ocean-ridge discontinuities in Iceland

Abstract

There are two main ocean-ridge discontinuities in Iceland: the Tjörnes Fracture Zone (TFZ) and the South Iceland Seismic Zone (SISZ). The TFZ is a 120-km-long and as much as 70-km-wide WNW-trending zone of high seismicity. It has three main seismic lineaments: the Husavik-Flatey Fault (HFF), the Dalvik lineament, and the Grimsey lineament. The HFF, a dextral strike-slip fault and active as a transform fault for about 9 Ma, has a cumulative transform-parallel displacement of some 60 km. Offshore, the HFF is marked by a transform (fracture-zone) valley, 5–10 km wide and 3–4 km deep. Onshore the Flateyjarskagi Peninsula the HFF is marked by a 3–5-km-wide zone of intense crustal deformation with numerous strike-slip and normal faults, transform-parallel dykes, dense sets of mineral veins, and subzones of completely crushed rocks, that is, fault cores. Where the HFF comes on land on Tjörnes there is a similar, but much thinner, zone of crushed rocks. The seismic lineaments are located a few tens of kilometres south (Dalvik) and north (Grimsey) of, and run subparallel with, the HFF. Both lineaments are composed of sets of NNW-trending sinistral faults arranged en echelon. The SISZ is a 70-km-long and 10–20-km wide zone of almost continuous seismicity located between the overlapping West and East Volcanic Zones. It produces the largest earthquakes in Iceland, some of which exceed M7, during which the N–S width of the zone may be as great as 50–60 km. The SISZ is partly covered with Holocene lava flows where the seismogenic faults occur as dextral NNE-trending and sinistral ENE-trending conjugate arrays with push-ups between their nearby ends. The same fault-segment trends occur in the Pleistocene pile north of the Holocene lava flows. The HFF is neither perpendicular to the nearby ridge segments nor parallel with the spreading vector. As a consequence, the North Volcanic Zone has propagated to the north and the Kolbeinsey Ridge to the south during the past 1 Ma, resulting in the development of the Grimsey and Dalvik lineaments. Similarly, the tip of the East Volcanic Zone has been propagating rapidly to the southwest during the past 3 Ma. The tip has been at its present location for no more than several hundred thousand years, thus making the SISZ less stable than the HFF. If the propagation of the tip of the East Volcanic Zone continues, it will eventually reach the Reykjanes Ridge, whereby either the West or the East Volcanic Zone becomes extinct. Then the SISZ dies out as a major seismic zone.