ABSTRACT
Geology is an appropriate background to the description and explanation of Arctic environments. Arctic soils are directly dependent on old bedrock because the rocks are less quickly destroyed by chemical weathering than in other climates. The early geological history is documented in the bedrock that is particularly well-exposed in the Arctic because of the poverty of higher vegetation, the removal of soils by extensive Quaternary glaciations, and the slow rate of weathering. The chapter traces, in the broadest of outlines, the Phanerozoic history of the jigsaw puzzle of continental and oceanic terrains of the Arctic. The Innuitain Orogen occupies much of the Arctic archipelago of Canada. Deposition of a thick suite of marine sediments continued into the Middle Devonian in the western part of the Franklinian Basin that is the Arctic Islands of Canada. The volcanism was connected with the opening of Baffin Bay, Davis Strait and the Labrador Seas between Greenland and Arctic Canada.
