Atlantic Continental Margin - lts History, lts Future

CIM Bulletin, 1970

THE DEFINITION of the continental margin, as considered in this paper, is in the broad sense: " ... those provinces of the continents and of the oceans which are associated with the boundary between these two first-order features of the earth" (Heezen et aL, 1959, p. 17) . The provinces in the area under consideration are: the Continental Shelf, the Continental Slope and the Continental Rise. The Continental Shelf extends from the shoreline to the shelf break, which lies at approximately the 200-meter isobaths throughout the region (except north of the Grand Banks, where the break may be defined more properly by the 400-meter isobaths ) . The Continental Sloped and Rise occur between the shelf break and the 4,000-meter isobaths. (The last figure was somewhat arbitrarily selected for the purpose of this paper. ) The Atlantic Continental Margin as thus defined extends along thee astern coast of Canada from the International Boundary in the Gulf of Maine northward to approximately the 60 °N latitude off t he coast of Labrador. The area of study amounts to at }east 500,000 square miles - an area roughly equivalent to 13 per cent of Canada's total land surface.

Mots Clés: Canada, Canadian, continental drift, continental slope, earth sciences, Georges Bank, Grand Banks, exploration, North, Oil, Oils, Research, sediments, Slopes