Crustal structure of rifted and convergent margins : the U.S. East Coast and Aleutian margins
type: CreativeWork
description: Many of the most important processes that create and modify continental crust occur at continental margins, but recently has the scientific community acquired the necessary intrumentation to image crustal structure across margins in detail. In this thesis we investigate the crustal structure across the U.S. East Coast rifted margin and the convergent margin of southwestern Alaska using modern, deep-penetrating marine seismic reflection/refraction data. We consider U.S. East Coast margin transects along the shelf offshore Georgia and across the mid-Atlantic margin near Chesapeak bay. Results by other workers, based on data from these transects, have shown that voluminous volcanism accompanied formation of the rifted margin during continental breakup. Results presented in this thesis constrain the landward extent of rift-related magmatic emplacement. We find that magmatic intrusion and underplating of pre-existing continental crust occurs primarily in extended crust and that crustal extension is focused in a 75-km-wide region beneath the shelf and slope. The crust thinned by 50 to 80% within this interval and then seafloor spreading began with an unusually large volume of igneous crust production. The initial volcanic extrusives were emplaced subaerially and are now present beneath the sediments in a thick seaward-dipping wedge. We use post-stack depth migration to image this wedge and use the resulting image to consider the early subsidence of the margin. The geometry of the subaerially extruded rift volcanics suggest that the margin subsided rapidly once volncanism began. We infer from the subsidence, the along-margin distribution of magmatic material, and the across-margin localization of magmatic emplacement and deformation that the U.S. East Coast rift volcanics had an anomalously-hot mantle source whose distribution beneath the lithosphere prior to rifting was long (the length of the margin) but not deep. We speculate that the distribution of this material was c…
abstract: Many of the most important processes that create and modify continental crust occur at continental margins, but recently has the scientific community acquired the necessary intrumentation to image crustal structure across margins in detail. In this thesis we investigate the crustal structure across the U.S. East Coast rifted margin and the convergent margin of southwestern Alaska using modern, deep-penetrating marine seismic reflection/refraction data. We consider U.S. East Coast margin transects along the shelf offshore Georgia and across the mid-Atlantic margin near Chesapeak bay. Results by other workers, based on data from these transects, have shown that voluminous volcanism accompanied formation of the rifted margin during continental breakup. Results presented in this thesis constrain the landward extent of rift-related magmatic emplacement. We find that magmatic intrusion and underplating of pre-existing continental crust occurs primarily in extended crust and that crustal extension is focused in a 75-km-wide region beneath the shelf and slope. The crust thinned by 50 to 80% within this interval and then seafloor spreading began with an unusually large volume of igneous crust production. The initial volcanic extrusives were emplaced subaerially and are now present beneath the sediments in a thick seaward-dipping wedge. We use post-stack depth migration to image this wedge and use the resulting image to consider the early subsidence of the margin. The geometry of the subaerially extruded rift volcanics suggest that the margin subsided rapidly once volncanism began. We infer from the subsidence, the along-margin distribution of magmatic material, and the across-margin localization of magmatic emplacement and deformation that the U.S. East Coast rift volcanics had an anomalously-hot mantle source whose distribution beneath the lithosphere prior to rifting was long (the length of the margin) but not deep. We speculate that the distribution of this material was c…
author: Lizarralde, Daniel
language: en_US
keywords: Continental margins, Submarine geology, Crust
date published: 1997-05
date modified: 2026-07-27T22:05:18Z
provider: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/5699

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.1575/1912/5699