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The myth of the De Geer Zone: a change of paradigm for the opening of the Fram Strait

2025· article· en· W4408529492 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueOpen Research Europe · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicGeological Studies and Exploration
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
FundersHorizon 2020 Framework ProgrammeNorges ForskningsrådTromsø Forskningsstiftelse
KeywordsGeologyTectonicsArcticCenozoicOrogenyRiftPaleontologyArchipelagoSeismologyPlate tectonicsFault (geology)OceanographyStructural basin

Abstract

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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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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.536
Threshold uncertainty score0.867

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.218
GPT teacher head0.375
Teacher spread0.156 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it