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How Was the Canadian Shield Formed?
The Canadian Shield formed over 3 billion years through processes such as plate tectonics, erosion and glaciation. Plate tectonics refers to the movement and collision of the Earth’s outer crust. When these crustal plates collide they may weld together, forming larger landmasses.The Shield can be thought of as a jigsaw puzzle of different crustal blocks, sometimes known as “provinces,” welded together over time. Each block is bounded by a belt of younger rock created when the blocks collided.
What is the Canadian shield?
The Canadian Shield refers to the exposed portion of the continental crust underlying the majority of North America. The crust, also known as the North American Craton, extends from northern Mexico to Greenland and consists of hard rocks at least 1 billion years old.
How much of Canada's land is covered by the North American crater?
At 5 million km2, the Shield makes up roughly 50 per cent of Canada’s land mass.
What are the traditional territories of the Canadian Shield?
The traditional territory of the Dene and Inuit includes the sections of the Shield now covered by the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. As Europeans began to settle and colonize the country, beavers found in the Shield region became a source for the fur trade ( see also Exploration ). Learning from Indigenous people, coureurs de bois, voyageurs and explorers used the birchbark canoe to travel and trade along the Shield’s many waterways. Later, beginning in the mid-1800s, railway construction meant blasting through Canadian Shield rock, exposing valuable minerals in the process. While the bare rock, thin soils, muskeg and insects of the Shield made living there difficult, the development of resource-based industries, such as mining and forestry, promoted increased settlement. Hydroelectric developments such as those at Churchill Falls, Labrador, James Bay, Québec, and Kettle Rapids, Manitoba, continue to feed electricity to urban centres in the south.
What are the animals that live in the Canadian Shield?
A wide range of wildlife calls the Canadian Shield home. Lakes and rivers in the south house a variety of fish species including trout, burbot and northern pike. In addition to fish, lakes are often spotted with a mix of waterfowl including wood ducks, Canada geese and American black ducks.
What are the lakes in the Shield?
In addition to the thousands of small lakes throughout the Shield, the region also borders many of the larger lakes and waterways of Canada: the eastern shores of Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca and Lake Winnipeg ;the northern shores of Lake of the Woods, Lake Superior and Lake Huron ;and the north shore of the St. Lawrence River.
What are the physical features of the Canadian Shield?
rn. The Canadian Shield’s most notable physical features are thousands of small lakes, thin layers of soil and rolling hills. Lakes are largely the result of glacial erosion during the last ice age.
What is Canadian shield?
The Canadian Shield is an advanced manufacturing company that specializes in the design, production, and distribution of medical devices, as well as medical manufacturing automation systems.
When was the Canadian shield contract completed?
Operations scaled quickly, up to a team of over 330 workers at peak production. The contract was completed in June, 2020, ahead of schedule.
Where are Canadian shield masks made?
The Canadian Shield installs a number of surgical mask production lines at their facility in Waterloo and quickly scales production of ASTM medical-grade face masks.
What is the Canadian shield made of?
The Canadian Shield constitutes the largest mass of exposed Precambrian rock on the face of Earth. The region, as a whole, is composed of ancient crystalline rocks whose complex structure attests to a long history of uplift and depression, mountain building ( orogeny ), and erosion. Some of the ancient mountain ranges can still be recognized as a ridge or belt of hills, but the present appearance of the physical landscape of the Canadian Shield is not so much a result of the folding and faulting and compression of the rocks millions of years ago as it is the work of ice in relatively recent geologic time. During the Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), the vast continental glaciers that covered northern North America had this region as a centre. The ice, in moving to the south, scraped the land bare of its overlying mantle of weathered rock. Some of this material was deposited on the shield when the ice melted, but the bulk of it was carried southward to be deposited south and southwest of the Canadian Shield.
What is the largest rock in Canada?
By far the largest of Canada’s physiographic regions, the Canadian Shield (sometimes called the Precambrian Shield) occupies... The Canadian Shield constitutes the largest mass of exposed Precambrian rock on the face of Earth.
What is the Canadian shield?
The Canadian Shield is a collage of Archean plates and accreted juvenile arc terranes and sedimentary basins of the Proterozoic Eon that were progressively amalgamated during the interval 2.45–1.24 Ga, with the most substantial growth period occurring during the Trans-Hudson orogeny, between ca. 1.90–1.80 Ga. [6] The Canadian Shield was the first part of North America to be permanently elevated above sea level and has remained almost wholly untouched by successive encroachments of the sea upon the continent. It is the Earth's greatest area of exposed Archean rock. The metamorphic base rocks are mostly from the Precambrian (between 4.5 billion and 540 million years ago) and have been repeatedly uplifted and eroded. Today it consists largely of an area of low relief 300–610 m (980–2,000 ft) above sea level with a few monadnocks and low mountain ranges (including the Laurentian Mountains) probably eroded from the plateau during the Cenozoic Era. During the Pleistocene Epoch, continental ice sheets depressed the land surface (creating Hudson Bay) but also tilted up its northeastern "rim" (the Torngat ), scooped out thousands of lake basins, and carried away much of the region's soil. The northeastern portion, however, became tilted up so that, in northern Labrador and Baffin Island, the land rises to more than 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) above sea level. According to Wikipedia.
Why do Canadians identify themselves as Canadians?
Canadians who identify themselves as ethnically “Canadian”, by and large, do so because that is the only ethnic identity that makes sense to them.
What is the most common tree in Canada?
Canada is covered with a vast boreal forest composed mostly of coniferous trees—of which jackpine is the most common. The sap of the jack pine is viscous and sticky, but when thinned with alcohol make a terrific anti-perspirant, first compounded by lumberjacks, known as the ‘Canadian Shield’.
Is there water in the shield?
Now, it’s not that water isn’t available on the shield. The shield is full of lakes. However, they’re all isolated from each other, unlike other lake and river systems that interconnect. Even the natives preferred to canoe in Lake Superior. There are rivers in the shield, but they’re fast moving and often go in the wrong direction.
Who designed the crest of arms?
Are we talking the crest of arms? That was designed by Cathy Bursey-Sabourin in 1921.
Does the shield prevent settlement?
For pretty much the whole of our history, the Shield has prevented settlement and travel in that area that it covers.
What is the Canadian shield?
The Canadian Shield, also known as the Laurentian Plateau, is an extended area of exposed metamorphic and Precambrian igneous rocks that form the geological core of North America. The Canadian Shield is made up of the oldest known rocks some of which date back to the formation of the planet. It covers half of Canada from the Arctic Ocean to the Great Lakes and extends southwards into the northern regions of the United States. The Canadian Shield is covered by a thin blanket of earth making it less useful in some economic activities such as manufacturing and farming but useful for logging, hydroelectric generation, and mining.
How many square miles is the Canadian shield?
The entire Canadian Shield covers an estimated 3.1 million square miles, but the greater shield extends from the Appalachian Mountains in the east, the Western Cordillera in the West, and southwards into Texas.
What are the five regions of the Canadian shield?
The Canadian Shield covers five physiographic regions that include the Laurentian Upland, Davis, Hudson and James Bays, and the Kazan Region . It extends into the northern United States as the Superior Uplands and the Adirondack Mountains.
What are the physical features of the Canadian shield?
Notable physical features in the Canadian Shield include the rolling hills, a shallow layer of soil, and hundreds of small lakes formed during the last glacial erosion. Other features from the glacial period include striations and drumlins. In addition to small lakes, the shield borders large lakes and waterways ...
How old is the U-shaped shield?
Formation. The U-shaped Shield is estimated to be 3.96 billion years old. It was once characterized by tall jagged peaks but years of erosion degraded the mountains to rolling hills. The Canadian Shield was the first part of the North American continent to be elevated above the sea level and managed to survive the encroachment of the sea.
Where is the largest concentration of operational mines on the shield located?
The largest concentration of operational mines on the Shield is found in Sudbury, Ontario, where gold, palladium, nickel, and copper are mined.
Formation
Geology
Contents
Geography
Flora and fauna
Wildlife
Resources
Industry
Environment
Early history
- The Canadian Shield is the traditional territory of several Indigenous peoples. The Innu made their home on the Shield in what is now Québec and Labrador, while the Cree, Anishinaabeg and Métis occupied large swaths of the region through Québec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. The traditional territory of the Dene and Inuit includes th...