Updated:

11th International Symposium on Deep Structure of the Continents and their Margins
26 Sept. – 1 Oct, 2004

Centre des Congres, Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, Canada

(Extract from the IGCP Project 474 Annual Report, 2004)

IGCP Project 474 was a sponsor of scientific sessions at a major deep seismic profiling conference at Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, Canada during September-October, 2004. Some details of the conference program and IGCP Project sessions are given below.

The main purpose of the conference was to bring together geoscientists who are actively working on research related to the deep structure and evolution of the continental lithosphere. This had been the purpose of the ten previous meetings since the first one in Ithaca, New York in 1984; the conference celebrated the 20th anniversary of this series of symposia. This meeting was also timely in that the Concluding Conference of Canada's LITHOPROBE program took place two weeks later (13-15 October) in Toronto. Seismix 2004 had a strong retrospective component, a review of current understandings of continental lithosphere, and indications of future research directions.

Scientific Programme

As at past conferences, oral and poster presentations described seismic techniques used to image or constrain the structure, composition and tectonics of the continental lithosphere. Presentations addressed the following process-oriented themes: - active or passive continental margins, continental collision and accretion, rifting and basins, and craton development. Seismic technique-oriented presentations were invited; these addressed numerical modelling, scattering, anisotropy, innovative acquisition and processing techniques, and integrated multidisciplinary case studies. Presentations represented research at different scales of structures, from high-resolution ore deposit studies or environmental surveys, to crustal-scale transects, to lithosphere-scale studies down to 410 or 660 km depths.

Because this is a 20th anniversary meeting, Classic Transects were showcased in a special IGCP Project 474 sponsored session.

Papers presented under the IGCP Project 474 program included the following:

• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – Reflections of the Lithoprobe SNORCLE transect in northwest Canada – F. a. Cook, A. J. Van der Velden & P. Erdmer.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – Crustal structure and tectonics across the Noth American – Pacific plate boundaryzone in southern California – G. S. Fuis, S. Baher, J. M. Murphy, T. Ryberg & W. J. Lutter.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – Long-lived echoes from the BABEL transect in the Baltic of northwestern Europe – D. B. Snyder.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – The 1991 Eastern Goldfields deep seismic reflection survey, Western Australia – B. R. Goleby & B. J. Drummond.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – A classic continental accretion and evolution model along the 110 km deep seismic transect in southern Queensland – D. M. Finlayson, C. G. Murray, D. W. Johnstone, E. C. Chudyk, R. J. Korsch, T. J. Barton & B. J. Drummond.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – New views of an old classic: COCORP Southern Appalachians I – F. A. Cook & K. Vasudevan.
• IGCP Classic Transect – Crustal structure of the northeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau – Songlin Li, W. D. Mooney, Xiankang Zhang, Qiyuan Liu & Guozhe Zhao.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – ANCORP'96: imaging convergent margin processes (Central Andes) – O. Onken & ANCORP Research Group.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – West margin of North America – a synthesis of seismic transects – G. S. Fuis.
• IGCP 474 Classic Transect – Continental assembly in the Late Archean: the LITHOPROBE abitibi-Grenville Transect across the southern Superior Province, Canada – A. J. Calvert, J. N. Ludden & G. Bellefleur.

The symposium was followed by a field excursion to the Kapuskasing Uplift (Chapleau-Foleyet Transect), the Southern Volcanic Zone of the Abitibi Greenstone Belt (Timmins, Porcupine Mining Camp), and the 1850 Ma Sudbury Structure of the Sudbury Igneous Complex ( variously described as being of meteoritic imact, impact-induced plutonism and volcanism, and volcanic origin).