Southern Canadian Shield in the Whitefish Falls – Sudbury area, Ontario, Canada
The purpose of the field trip is to acquaint students with outstanding, and to a large part, unique geological characteristics of the Whitefish Falls – Sudbury area at the North Shore of Lake Huron, Northern Ontario. Here, three structural provinces, the Archean Superior, the Paleoproterozoic Southern and the Neoproterozoic Grenville, are exposed. Superb rock exposure offers insight into a number of most important geological events and processes that shaped this area from Archean to Recent times. Besides tectonic, sedimentary, magmatic and metamorphic processes of multiple orogenies, this area also hosts the relics of the second largest meteorite impact known on Earth, the 1.85 Ga Sudbury Impact structure. The central portion of this impact structure, the Sudbury Basin, allows us to study the effects of hyper-velocity meteorite impact occurring during planetary collisions. At the same time, the Basin is of utmost importance for the exploration of metal-rich sulphides and, as a result, has been coined a “world-class mining camp”. We hope that the participants of the field trip will enjoy the unique geology of Northern Ontario, just as generations of geology students have before, and take away a deeper understanding of a multitude of earth processes.
Simplified tectonic map of the Great Lakes region and the Southern Province north of Lake Huron. EPO – Eastern Penokean Orogen. [U. Riller, 2014]