The cretaceous opening of the Northeast Atlantic

Abstract

A continuous rift system from the Rockall Trough through the Faeroe-Shetland Channel, and the Møre and Vøring basins up to the Tromsø and Bear Island basins is inferred to have developed during the Cretaceous. Oceanic crust was generated in its southern part but its width presumably decreases toward the northeast and probably ends in the Møre Basin. This rift/spreading system requires a clockwise rotation of Greenland and the Rockall Plateau during the Cretaceous around a rotation pole at its northern end at about 74°N 21°E. North of the pole of rotation crustal shortening must have occurred. This compression is interpreted to have taken place on West Spitsbergen. The orogeny there is reinterpreted as 1. (1) a Cretaceous folding phase, 2. (2) a phase of overthrusting at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, and 3. (3) an extensional faulting phase during the Oligocene. This plate-tectonic model can resolve a series of problems in the Northeast Atlantic region: the connection of the Caledonian fronts of Scotland and Greenland can be easily established. The northern ends of the West Shetland Basin and the North Sea graben; the unusual depth of the Møre and Vøring basins; the marked obliqueness of structural trends between the Northeast Greenland shelf and the Norwegian shelf; the fact that the western Hammerfest Basin was intersected by a younger north-south trending graben which formed the deep Tromsø Basin—all these enigmatic observations can be explained by the Cretaceous rift system.