Introduction to special section on the Northern Chugach Mountains‐Southern Copper River Basin Segment of the Alaskan Transect

Abstract

This special section of the Journal of Geophysical Research is the second part of a collection of papers on the nature and evolution of the lithosphere in southern Alaska, specifically beneath the Chugach Mountains and Copper River Basin. The studies in this collection were conducted under the Trans‐Alaska Lithosphere Investigation [Stone et al., 1986]: a coordinated geological and geophysical transect of the Alaskan lithosphere along the north‐south, trans‐Alaska oil pipeline corridor between Valdez and Prudhoe Bay and across the Pacific and Arctic continental margins. The Trans‐Alaska Crustal Transect (TACT) project of the U.S. Geological Survey was the primary source of support for these studies, including all the seismic refraction and reflection profiling and most of the geologic field investigations.The first part of the collection appeared in the April 1989 issue and focused on the geology and tectonics of the northern Chugach Mountains and southern Copper River Basin and on the interpretation of a 107‐km‐long seismic reflection profile along the transect. Appended to those papers, but not included in the introduction [Page, 1989], was an interpretation of the upper crustal structure of the Chugach terrane derived from a transverse (east‐west) seismic refraction profile along the axis of the Chugach Mountains [Wolf and Levander, 1989].