Abstract
LONDON. Geological Society, November 4.—N. E. Odell: Preliminary notes on the geology of the eastern parts of central Spitsbergen; with especial reference to the problem of the Hecla Hook formation. Approximately, the area amounts to 2000 square miles, but only a relatively small portion of this could be actually examined. It consists of a mountainous tract much of which is submerged under “highland ice” and glaciers, and is therefore lacking in direct rock-evidence. But through this ice-covering break many “nunatakkr,” and, on the west of the region, a high range of mountains—the Chydenius Range'of which Mount Newton (5445 feet) is claimed to be the culminating point of Spitsbergen. The rocks encountered include representatives of the meta-morphic basement complex, the Hecla Hook formation (which is intimately associated with that complex), the Carboniferous system, and intrusive acid and basic igneous facies. No evidence was found of rocks earlier in age than the Hecla Hook series, and an Archaean, formation must be presumed absent. The greatest acid intrusions are those of the pink and grey granites in the Mount Newton and Mount Chernishev massif, both of the pre-Carboniferous (and presumably pre-Devonian) age. They would appear to have been intruded at the time of the Caledonian folding, and though towards its close, yet prior to the earliest Devonian sedimentation. Except in the south, on the Nordenskiold Glacier, the Devonian strata are entirely absent, having been eroded from the interfolded Hecla Hook sediments and granites before the transgression of the Upper Carboniferous sea. The Carboniferous is confined to the coast of Hinlopen Strait, from Cape Fanshawe so far south as Bismarck Strait, while Triassic deposits were not seen north of the latter.—K. S. Sandford: The geology of North-East Land (Spitsbergen). North-East Land is separated by a narrow strait from the main island of Spitsbergen, and is about 8000 square miles in area. A great part of the coast and the whole of the interior are completely hidden by ice, which forms a dome rising to about 2400 feet. The northern area consists of Older Palseozoic rocks, granite, and gneiss; the last two being probably younger than the ancient sedimentary rocks. A pink granite penetrates them, and has. been found extensively developed in the southern part of this “northern oldland.” An important discovery in 1924 was the south-eastern corner of this pink granite, in the middle of the east coast, which previously had been known only as an unbroken and precipitous ice-front over 100 miles long. The southern area of the Island is delimited from the northern by an east-and-west fjord. This is an area of undisturbed Upper Carboniferous and Permo-Carboniferous clays and cherts, to a visible thickness of more than 1000 feet: the fauna belongs to the Russian Province. The history of the Island has been one of quiescence and immunity from folding, in an area of shallow seas. It has been affected by vertical movements, also by acid intrusions (Pateo-zoic) and by basic intrusions (Cretaceous).
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Societies and Academies. Nature 116, 840–843 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116840a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116840a0