Conductive structures under the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Abstract

The paper reports results from an array of 33 three-component magnetometers that recorded time-varying fields in 1981 over an area of some 56 000 km2 in the Canadian Cordillera. The array was centred at Tête Jaune Cache in the Rocky Mountain Trench, where a large magnetovariation anomaly had been located in an earlier array study. It was bisected by the trench and extended to the northeast across the Rocky Mountains to the Alberta Foothills and to the southwest across the Cariboo and Monashee mountains. Magnetograms and Fourier transform maps covering the period range 10–91 min show strong attenuation of the vertical component, Z, southwest of the Rocky Mountain Trench, with very large Z amplitudes in the Main Ranges of the Rockies. The horizontal components show an elongated anomaly along the Rocky Mountains Main Ranges and Trench, with three-dimensional features superimposed. The conductive structures include a highly conductive layer, probably in the lower crust, southwest of the trench and a conductive ridge rising into the upper crust near the edge of that layer. Current models have been fitted to observed vertical -and horizontal-component anomalies and show that both layer and ridge are necessary for a fit and that the ridge is 50–80 km wide. Single-station transfer functions at periods of 10 and 22 min have been calculated from a number of variation events of various polarizations, to reduce any displacement of the anomalies by auroral-zone source currents. Artificial-event analysis, with these transfer functions, shows that the conductive ridge lies under the Main Ranges of the Rockies and not under the trench. Its great width indicates a structure of major tectonic significance, which will be considered in another paper.