One sees the sharpest local relief along the southern edge, especially the Laurentide Escarpment in Quebec. Other evidence of past glacial structures include striations (lines scraped into rocks) and drumlins (long hills of glacial sediment). The shield holds great hydroelectric potential, especially along its southern edge where local relief is most abrupt. Canada's largest geographical feature, it stretches east to Labrador, south to Kingston on Lake Ontario and northwest as far as the Arctic Ocean. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2. The North American craton is the bedrock forming the heart of the North American continent and the Canadian Shield is the largest exposed part of the craton's bedrock. The Canadian Shield constitutes the largest mass of exposed Precambrian rock on the face of Earth. - massive, geologically ancient region of Canada. As mountains erode, their roots rise and are eroded in turn.
Many of Canada's major ore deposits are associated with Precambrian volcanoes.
The rocks that now form the surface of the Shield were once far below the Earth's surface.
The nearby but less-known Temagami Magnetic Anomaly has striking similarities to the Sudbury Basin. The resulting surface consists of rocky, ice-smoothed hills with an average relief of 30 metres (100 feet), together with irregular basins, which are mostly filled by lakes or swamps. These soils are mainly spodosols, associated with evergreen forest, while the northern TUNDRA soils are heavily moisture laden and frozen for much of the year.
The northeastern portion, however, became tilted up so that, in northern Labrador and Baffin Island, the land rises to more than 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) above sea level. In northeastern Quebec, the giant Manicouagan Reservoir is the site of an extensive hydroelectric project (Manic-cinq, or Manic-5).
Some of this material was deposited on the shield when the ice melted, but the bulk of it was carried southward to be deposited south and southwest of the Canadian Shield. When the Greenland section is included, the Shield is approximately circular, bounded on the northeast by the northeast edge of Greenland, with Hudson Bay in the middle. The kimberlite pipes in which the diamonds are found are closely associated with cratons, which provide the deep lithospheric mantle required to stabilize diamond as a mineral. Each belt probably grew by the coalescence of accumulations erupted from numerous vents, making the tally of volcanoes reach the hundreds.
It is composed of igneous and metamorphic rock of Precambrian origin, some of the oldest rock on Earth. The Ekati and Diavik mines are actively mining kimberlite diamonds.
This region is the largest one of them all!
[11] The Canadian Shield also contains the Mackenzie dike swarm, which is the largest dike swarm known on Earth.[12]. The Canadian Shield!
It covers much of Greenland, all of Labrador and the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, most of Quebec north of the St. Lawrence River, much of Ontario including northern sections of the Ontario Peninsula, the Adirondack Mountains[7] of New York, the northernmost part of Lower Michigan and all of Upper Michigan, northern Wisconsin, northeastern Minnesota, the central and northern portions of Manitoba away from Hudson Bay, northern Saskatchewan, a small portion of northeastern Alberta,[8] mainland Northwest Territories to the east of a line extended north from the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, most of Nunavut's mainland and, of its Arctic Archipelago, Baffin Island and significant bands through Somerset, Southampton, Devon and Ellesmere islands. The Canadian Shield is a physiographic division comprising four smaller physiographic provinces: the Laurentian Upland, Kazan Region, Davis and James. Glacial debris has been deposited in river valleys and lowlands to considerable depths, such as around James Bay and Hudson Bay, giving the landscapes a notable flatness. The metamorphic base rocks are mostly from the Precambrian (between 4.5 billion and 540 million years ago) and have been repeatedly uplifted and eroded. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
1.90–1.80 Ga.[6] The Canadian Shield was the first part of North America to be permanently elevated above sea level and has remained almost wholly untouched by successive encroachments of the sea upon the continent. The shield consists of some of the world’s oldest rocks, which…
The physiographic region called the Canadian Shield: *A) is the geologic core of North America B) is an intermontane zone C) consists of extensive mountainous terrain D) is bordered on the west by the Appalachian Mountains E) is also known as the Arctic Coastal Plain
The boreal forest area gives way to the Eastern Canadian Shield taiga that covers northern Quebec and most of Labrador. The shield is stable continental crust gently rolling in character (under 2,000 ft or 600 m) with occasional prominent uplifts of crustal blocks. The Canadian Shield is among the oldest on earth, with regions dating from 2.5 to 4.2 billion years.
Metallic ores are concentrated in an arc between the North ATLANTIC OCEAN, ST. LAWRENCE RIVER, and the Arctic as, for example, nickel at Sudbury, copperlead-zinc at Flin Flon, and iron ore on the Quebec-Labrador border and in western Ontario. A huge inland sea called Hudson Bay extends into the heart of Canada, and wrapped around this bay is a rocky region called the Canadian Shield. This is a vast, deeply dissected mountain range, stretching from northernmost Ellesmere Island to the northernmost tip of Labrador.
The Midwestern Canadian Shield forests that run westwards from Northwestern Ontario have boreal forests that give way to taiga in the most northerly parts of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Railroad lines extend from the Prairie Provinces to Churchill on Hudson Bay as well as to mining developments on the Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, and to James Bay in Quebec. Although these mountains are now heavily eroded, many large mountains still exist in Canada's far north called the Arctic Cordillera. Though primarily rock, water, and ice, the shield also hosts a vast boreal or softwood forest of spruce, fir, pines, and tamaracks, tall and dense in the south to short and sparse in the north. Hydrologic drainage is generally poor, the soil compacting effects of glaciation being one of the many causes. the largest-known meteorite impact craters on Earth, "Metallogeny and Tectonic Evolution of the Trans-Hudson Orogen", Alberta Heritage - Alberta Online Encyclopedia, 3-D Magnetic Imaging using Conjugate Gradients: Temagami anomaly, Report on the 2007 Diamond Drilling Program, McClarty Lake Project, Manitoba: The Pas Mining District NTS 63-K-08; UTM ZONE 14 N 415938 E, 6038968 N; 54° 29′ 28″ N 100° 17′ 52″ W, World Wars and Interwar Years (1914–1945), Two Creeks Buried Forest State Natural Area, Withrow Moraine and Jameson Lake Drumlin Field, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canadian_Shield&oldid=985882221, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2011, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2010, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat-VIAF identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 28 October 2020, at 14:30.
This arrangement was caused by severe glaciation during the ice age, which covered the Shield and scraped the rock clean. It covers Labrador, most of Quebec and Ontario, much of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, a tiny part of north east Alberta, and part of the Northwest Territories! The Canadian Shield’s most notable physical features are thousands of small lakes, thin layers of soil and rolling hills. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/place/Canadian-Shield, The Canadian Encyclopedia - Canadian Shield, Canadian Shield - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up).
It is the Earth's greatest area of exposed Archean rock. This is one of the largest-known meteorite impact craters on Earth.
The current surface expression of the Shield is one of very thin soil lying on top of the bedrock, with many bare outcrops. - largest physical region. The Canadian Shield is a U-shaped subsection of the Laurentia craton signifying the area of greatest glacial impact (scraping down to bare rock) creating the thin soils. Sudbury, Ontario, at 160,500 is the largest metropolitan center in the region, followed by Thunder Bay, Ontario, at 125,000. It was split into Greenland, Laurentia, Scotland, and Siberia, and is now roughly situated in the Arctic around the current North Pole. Settlements today are mostly small, widely dispersed, have narrowly based economies based on extractive industries such as mining, and are controlled largely by the urban-industrial core to the south. The shield has figured prominently in the development of Canadian character and culture, as evidenced in everything from art and music to the stories of Jack London.
By far the largest of Canada’s physiographic regions, the Canadian Shield (sometimes called the Precambrian Shield) occupies about half of the total area of the country and is centred on Hudson Bay. Intimate functional relationships have grown up between the resource areas of the shield and the processing industries of the St. Lawrence Valley. The Shield is covered in parts by vast boreal forests in the south that support natural ecosystems as well as a major logging industry. Glaciation has left the area only a thin layer of soil, through which the composition of igneous rock resulting from long volcanic history is frequently visible. The shield effectively divided eastern and western CANADA and posed a major barrier to westward migration. Inuit and native populations are well represented on the shield, although in scattered locations, and the population in general faces limited economic opportunities, unemployment, and related social problems. The Shield, particularly the portion in the Northwest Territories, has recently been the site of several major diamond discoveries. [13] Precambrian rock is the major component of the bedrock.
The range's highest peak is Nunavut's Barbeau Peak at 2,616 metres (8,583 ft) above sea level.
Glacier ice scoured the rock and sculpted river valleys, dragged and laid down boulders called erratics, and severely disrupted the surface drainage pattern.
The Shield was originally an area of very large, very tall mountains (about 12,000 m or 39,000 ft)[10] with much volcanic activity, but over hundreds of millions of years, the area has been eroded to its current topographic appearance of relatively low relief.
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