Abstract
Superior Province is an Archean craton surrounded by Proterozoic orogenic belts. Although some Proterozoic deformation locally affected the craton, most of its structures are Archean. The craton comprises alternate E/W-trending subprovinces of volcano-plutonic, metasedimentary, plutonic, and high-grade gneiss types. Gold-quartz vein deposits are confined to the volcano-plutonic subprovinces and their margins and occur in or adjacent to brittle-ductile faults that range from one to hundreds of kilometers long. Regardless of size, gold-bearing structures and regional faults conform to a remarkably consistent province-wide pattern of orientation and slip sense; E/W-trending faults are typically high-angle reverse or dextral strike-slip, and oblique-slip faults of the NW- and NE-trending sets have dextral and sinistral components, respectively. Rocks adjacent to faults are typically penetratively strained over large areas; this strain takes the form of large folds subparallel to subprovince boundaries and steep metamorphic foliations and stretching lineations with variations from subvertical to subhorizontal plunges. The reticulate to anastomosed patterns produced by interaction of the fault sets, coupled with the large-scale variations in orientation of finite strain axes, suggest a transpressive tectonic regime related to oblique accretion of subprovinces in the late Archean.
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Poulsen, K.H., Robert, F., Card, K.D. (1992). Transpressive tectonics and the Archean gold deposits of Superior Province, Canadian Shield. In: Bartholomew, M.J., Hyndman, D.W., Mogk, D.W., Mason, R. (eds) Basement Tectonics 8. Proceedings of the International Conferences on Basement Tectonics, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1614-5_43
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