Kennedy Channel and its geophysical lineaments: new evidence that the Wegener Fault is a myth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
2010, the year under review, marks the centennial of perhaps the most controversial structure in the Arctic: the Wegener Fault, the 1000-km long fracture that is supposed to underlie Nares Strait and define the north-western margin of an independent Greenland plate (Fig. 1). The seaway between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, Canada, was branded a megashear by Frank Taylor who, purely on physiographic expression, postulated massive Tertiary strike-slip (Taylor 1910). This revolutionary idea fittingly found a place in Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift and thereafter in plate-tectonic theory with Greenland drifting hundreds of kilometres from North America along what Tuzo Wilson subsequently dubbed the ‘Wegener Fault’ (Wilson 1963). Today, the concept lives on. In modern palaeogeography, Nares Strait is given a long multiphase dynamic history with collision of Greenland and Canada in the Palaeogene (Fig. 1). A freely drifting Greenland plate unconstrained by ties to North America is now part of conventional wisdom as related in textbooks, review articles and educational material available on the internet. Accordingly, the Wegener Fault is a standard feature in international compilations of world geology (e.g. UNESCO 2010; Fig. 2). Unfortunately, this 100-year acclamation from Taylor (1910) to UNESCO (2010) is fundamentally flawed: the rocks and their relationships at Nares Strait flatly contradict the existence of the structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".