The myth of the De Geer Zone: a change of paradigm for the opening of the Fram Strait
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Cenozoic rifting in the Arctic and the resulting opening of the Labrador Sea and the Fram Strait are typically associated with the movement of the Svalbard Archipelago c. 400 km southwards and its separation from Greenland. Thus far, most of this tectonic displacement was ascribed to lateral movement along the N-S-striking De Geer Zone, a thousand-kilometer-long paleo-transform fault believed to extend from northwestern Norway to northern Greenland. Methods: The study presents a new interpretation of tectonic structures on seismic reflection data north and west of Svalbard. Results: The present study reports the presence of two km-thick, hundreds of kilometers long, E-W- to WNW-ESE-striking shear zones, northwest and west of the island of Spitsbergen, Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic. Contractional structures within the shear zones, their strike, the inferred transport direction, and the great depth at which they are found indicate that they formed during the Timanian Orogeny in the late Neoproterozoic (c. 650-550 Ma). These structures extend at least 80-90 km west of the coastline of Spitsbergen. The presence of continuous, late Neoproterozoic Timanian thrusts this far west of Spitsbergen invalidates the occurrence of c. 400 km lateral movements along the N-S-striking De Geer Zone along the western Barents Sea-Svalbard margin in the Cenozoic. Conclusions: The present results suggest that the De Geer Zone does not exist and that related fault complexes (e.g., Hornsund Fault Complex) did not accommodate any strike-slip movement. In addition, the formation of major NW-SE-striking transform faults in the Fram Strait was controlled by late Neoproterozoic Timanian thrust systems. The present results call for major revisions of all current plate tectonics models for the opening of the Fram Strait and Arctic tectonics in the Cenozoic and for critical reviews of major fault zones inferred from indirect observations.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".