Ultramafic-mafic (ophiolite) complexes of the kind discussed in the lecture on the

structure of oceanic crust, all lie above continental crust located adjacent to the
continent-ocean interface. Emplacement of the supposed oceanic material is
thought to have resulted from the attempted subduction of continental crust
beneath oceanic crust along slip surfaces dipping towards the ocean. This process is
known as obduction. Because continental crust is less dense and more buoyant
than oceanic crust, the former will eventually rise leaving the oceanic material
stranded on
the continental
margin.
In some
cases, the
oceanic slab
may migrate
under the
influence of
gravity
towards the
continental
interior,
causing the
development of a foreland basin (also known in the older literature as an
exogeosyncline) between the obducted oceanic crust and the continental interior as
a result of the depression of the continental margin. The sediments deposited in the
basin will include turbidite material of both continental (e.g. K-feldspar; muscovite)
and oceanic (e.g chromite) derivation. As the ophiolite migrates landward it
overrides its own debris, which is converted to an olistostromal melange composed
of blocks of sandstone and ophiolite material in a scaly textured fine-grained pelitic
material.
A classic Canadian example of obduction and foreland basin development is
represented by the Bay of Islands ultramafic - mafic complex and underlying
sedimentary units of Western Newfoundland. (see also :

Confirmation of the Betts Cove observation was provided in the same year by Fergus Graham (later chief
geologist with BP) in his exploration report for Long Lac Gold Mines ( "....the lower part examined consists
almost entirely of a complex series of thin sills with few interstratified volcanics. In the upper part the sills
gradually become less numerous....these rocks display a sharply layered appearance with a fairly
constant dip and strike. Contacts between the sills are often extremely sharp and cross cutting
relationships occur." ) These observations clearly confirmed that "sheeted diabases" were also present in
the Blow Me Down ophiolite of Western Newfoundland.
The discovery of "sheeted diabase" unit in the Newfoundland ophiolites was reported at the Atlantic

City GSA meeting in the Fall of 1969 and at the International Symposium on Mechanical Properties and
Processes in the Mantle, Flagstaff, Arizona, 24 June - 3 July, 1970. Stevens also incorporated the finding
into his representation (1970) of the Bay of Islands ophiolite of Western Newfoundland as a thrust sheet
of oceanic crust in his seminal paper, presented at the GAC Annual Meeting in Montreal in 1969, on the
"Cambro-Ordovician flysch sedimentation and tectonics in west Newfoundland and their possible bearing
on a proto-Atlantic Ocean ". John Dewey's paper in Nature linking the evolution of the CaledonianAppalachian system to a plate tectonic schema also appeared in 1969, but is not referenced in Steven's
1970 paper (submitted 1969), nor even by Dewey and Bird (1971; submitted in December 1970). Clearly
therefore Dewey's paper in terms of ideas linking Appalachian geology to plate tectonics provided no
impetus over that already provided by Wilson and Fritz, and with regard to the interpretation of the role of
ophiolites in the plate tectonic interpretation of the Appalachians the explanation presented by Dewey,
and Bird and Dewy was quite different from the obduction model we espoused.
We were also impressed by the dynamothermal aureoles associated with the Western Newfoundland
and Baie Verte ophiolite , and consequently proposed (Church and Stevens, 1970) that the ophiolites
may have been emplaced directly onto the Fleur de Lys metamorphic rocks of the continental margin,
immediately following the inception an an ocean-forming ridge within the sialic basement of the
Appalachian-Caledonian geosyncline, or, alternatively, that the ophiolites may have been emplaced
during the closing of the Appalachian ocean while the ridge was positioned close to the continental margin

or was newly developing within the margin, a view I later (1973) adapted in explanation of the Ballantrae
ophiolite of Scotland - "The existence of high temperature aureoles implies that that the time of their
emplacement were relatively hot and that the age of the ophiolites should not differ greatly from that of
their emplacement. It also follows that the place of origin of the ophiolites should be a site of high heat
flow and thin lithosphere located relatively near the zone of emplacement"; "The glaucophane at
Ballantrae may ...have developed along a thrust, within the lower part of the basal ganulite-amphibolitegreenschist 'aureole', during a period of 'cold' thrusting later than the primary emplacement of the
ophiolite and formation of the basal amphibolite." It was also pointed out that "it seems likely that a period
of subduction followed obduction of oceanic crust, since the the ophiolites are overlain by arc-type
volcanic rocks which are in part younger than sediments containing debris derived from the ophiolite."
The oceanic spreading centre interpretation for
ophiolites contrasted with that of Bird and Dewey
(1970) who held that the Bay of Islands ophiolite' were
intrusive igneous bodies derived as diapirs from a
subduction zone, a view that was retained by other
British workers such as Baker (1973) and Maltman
(1975) in the case of the ophiolites of Anglesey. A
second point of difference concerned the polarity of
subduction. According to Dewey (1969) and Bird and
Dewey (1970) subduction was directed in a generally
western direction, that is under the North American
continent so that the ancient continental margin would
have had the character of an Andean mountain range.
The Newfoundland scenario was extended to the
Quebec Appalachians at the symposium 'The ancient
oceanic lithosphere' held at Carleton University,
Ottawa, in October 1970, at which time the consensus view in Quebec (e.g. Lamarche, 1972) was that
the ophiolites of the Sherbrooke area were formed as massive sea-floor volcanic extrusions - the classic
'epanchements sous-marins' of Routhier and his co-workers Brun and Dubertret
By late 1971, Dewey and Bird (1971; and Bird, Dewey, and Kidd (1971) ) had accepted our interpretation
of the formation and emplacement of the Western Newfoundland ophiolites but suggested that they
formed in a small ocean basin above a west dipping subduction zone.
Later workers (Williams, 1971, 1972; Upadyhay et al, 1971; Williams and Malpas. 1972, dikes and
breccias; Williams and Smyth. 1973; Norman and Strong, 1975; and Riccio, 1976) have substantially
supported the concept of an oceanic origin of the Newfoundland ophiolites, and it is now also generally
accepted that the sedimentary rocks of west Newfoundland represent a telescoped continental margin of
Cambro-Ordovician age, and that the sedimentary and tectonic evolution of the region is related to a cycle
of birth and destruction of an Early Paleozoic ocean.
In 1973 Church and Gayer suggested that in the case of the Caledonian Ballantrae ophiolite of
southern Scotland, its northwesterly obduction was
succeeded by a flip in the direction of subduction
from SE to NW, the ophiolites being overlain by arctype volcanic rocks which are in part younger than
sediments containing debris derived from the
ophiolite." (See also Draut and Clift, 2002 and Kim,
Coish, Evans and Dick 2003. Supra-subduction zone
extensional magmatism in Vermont and adjacent
Quebec: implications for early Paleozoic Appalachian
tectonics. BGSA, 115, p. 1552-1569.) They also
proposed that the Proto-Atlantic suture "separating

the Ordovician plates should lie in the vicinity of the Solway Firth (Fig 3)." ,and that the Proto-Atlantic
suture in Newfoundland separated the Exploits Zone from the Caldwell - Fleur de Lys orthotectonic zone
(Dunnage Zone of Williams).
In 1973 Miyashiro published his controversial paper 'The Troodos ophiolitic complex was formed in an
island arc.' , in which he argued that the chemical character of the Troodos ophiolite indicated that it
formed in a magma chamber located within an island arc. No recognition was given to the significance of
the sheeted dike unit in the Troodos complex, and Miyashiro's claim was clearly a reversion to the earlier
ideas of Dewey, Bird, Baker, and Maltman. However in the same year a sheeted diabase unit was found
in the Bou Azzer ophiolite complex of the El Graara inlier, Marocco (Church and Young, 1974)
Workers in Quebec (St. Julien, P. and Hubert, C. 1975. Evolution of the Taconian Orogen in the Quebec
Appalachians. American Jour. Sci., 275-A, p.337-362) also slowly adopted the 'ocean crust' interpretation.
Reluctantly however, since although St. Julien and Hubert (1975) did reference Stevens' 1969 ophiolite
obduction emplacement paper they only commented on his views concerning the presence of wildflysch
units associated with the Taconic klippen in Western Newfoundland; no attribution was gven to the far
more important proposal concerning ophiolites as oceanic crust, or the obduction relationship of the
klippen to the ophiolites. In fact the idea that the ophiolites were of oceanic origin was attributed by StJulien and Hubert to Laval geologist Roger Laurent (1973). Nor were the lateral correlations between
Newfoundland and Quebec along the length of the Appalachians embraced at this time by New EnglandQuebec workers.
In 1976 Ray Coish and I published a rationalization of Miyashiro's chemical observations concerning
Troodos, pointing out that the arc-like TiO2 characteristics of Troodos were shared by the adjacent Baer
Bassit ophiolite of Syria and the internal zone ophiolites of the Newfoundland Appalachians, but that in all
cases the internal stratigraphy of these ophiolites clearly favoured their formation by crustal spreading
and not by intrusion into an arc complex. In 1977 Riccio and I devised a general classification for
Appalachian ophiolites based on the variation in the nature of cumulate sequence in ophiolites. Ray
Coish (Coish and Church, 1979) showed how the arc-like Ti-depleted character of the ophiolites of the
Appalachian internal belt in Newfoundland and Quebec - as well as some dikes of the Bay of Islands
ophiolite - was also reflected in the REE patterns of basaltic rocks. In 1982 boninites were found to
characterise the fore-arc basement of the Mariana arc, and their chemical character as determined by
Hickey and Frey (1982) allowed the low-Ti, olivine-orthopyroxene cumulates type internal zone ophiolites
to be characterized as fore-arc 'boninitic' complexes (Coish, Hickey and Frey, 1982). Later they would
come to be known as supra-subduction zone ophiolite complexes. (Pearce, Lippard, and Roberts, 1984),
and as such were related to back-arc spreading processes.
The identity of the Quebec internal zones ophiolites with those of the Newfoundland Appalachians was
restated in 1977, and the internal ophiolite zone front extending from Newfoundland to Quebec was
defined as the 'Asbestos Line'. The Proto-Atlantic suture was shown to follow the boundary between the
Caldwell - Fleur de Lys orthotectonic zone and the Tetagouche - Expoits volcanic zone, following the
Victoria Lake - Dunnage fault in Central Newfoundland. In this respect the Fleur de Lys orthotectonic zone
was considered to extend beneath the internal zone ophiolite belt out to at least the suture boundary. This
contrasts with the scenario later advanced by Williams and St Julien (1982), where this boundary was
postulated to represent the actual suture interface of the Appalachian continental and oceanic domains.
In 1977 Bill Kidd made the case for the ophiolites representing an arc-related small Ordovician marginal
basin (Kidd, W.S.F. 1977. The Baie Verte Lineament, Newfoundland: ophiolite complex floor and mafic
volcanic fill or a small Ordovician marginal basin. p 407-418 in Talwani, M., and Pitman, W., eds., Island
arcs, deep-sea trenches, and back-arc basins. Am. Geoph. Union, Maurice Ewing series, v. 1.) Important
observations made by Kidd concerning the Baie Verte olistostrome above the ophiolite at the base of the
Baie Verte arc volcanic sequence included: "Other rare clasts within the conglomerate include pieces of
silicic tuff with a strong pre-depositional foliation; these range in size from pebbles to a slab 1 metre
across." "Also matchable with the Grand Cove rocks to the east is one large block (1x2 metres exposed)

of silicic meta-siltstone possessing a well-developed pre-depositional muscovite schistosity axial surface

to tight folds, both refolded by open angular folds that are also predepositional."
The 'back-arc theme was also taken up by Upadhyay, H.D. and Neale, E.R.W. (1979. On the tectonic
regimes of ophiolite genesis. Earth Planetary Sc. Letters, 43, 93-102.)
In 1983 Jim Hibbard published his monumental Memoir and map for the geology of the Burlington
Peninsula (Hibbard, J. 1983. Geology of the Baie Verte Peninsula, Newfoundland. Dept of Mines and
Energy, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Memoir 2, 279 p.). The memoir includes a thorough
historiographic review of the evolution of ideas concerning the geological evolution of the Burlington
Peninsula.
In 1987 I suggested that Appalachian ophiolites represent fore-arc rather than back-arc spreading
centres as was the then popular view - " A new approach would be to consider the Thetford ophiolite as
having formed in a fore-arc spreading centre environment, as envisioned by Pearce, Lippard, and Roberts
(1984), tectonically transported by strike-slip faulting as a fore-arc sliver." "low Ti complexes such as
Thetford, Betts Cove, and Cyprus represent incipient or active spreading centres formed within fore-arc
strike-slip zones in response to rapid oblique subduction. The strike-slip faulting was also responsible for
the separation of the slivers from the developing arc as well as their lateral transportation to a location
perhaps distant from their place of origin." " ..even the Coastal complex of western Newfoundland, rather
than having formed within a ridge transform as supposed by Karson et al (1983) may represent an
incipient spreading centre of Betts Cove type developed within a strike-slip fault zone." "The red argillites
could post-date entirely the cessation of attempted subduction of the supposed slope and rise sediments
of the Caldwell Group in a progressively widening basin to the rear of the obducted ophiolite prior to the
initiation of Ascot-Weedon arc volcanism ( = Burlington magmatism in Newfoundland) in response to a
switch in subduction polarity."