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Regional Mapping and Petrographic Study of a Silurian Gneissic Complex, Belle Cote Road, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

Date

1987-04-15

Authors

Marcotte, Jill-Annette

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Abstract

The Leblanc Lake area is located in the central Cape Breton Highlands south of the Cheticamp River. The main study area is situated along Belle Cote Road, one of the numerous logging roads in the region. Mapping at 1:10,000 scale revealed three distincts units. From west to east these are the George Brook amphibolite, a variably deformed amphibolite-garnet amphibolite with local calc-silicate bands, most likely representing synvolcanic intrusions, the Corney Brook schist, which is a medium to high grade porphyroblastic schist (the high grade equivalent of the Faribault Brook metasedimentary rocks), and the Belle Cote Road gneiss, an Ordovician to Silurian tonalitic to granodioritic orthogneiss. Based on field relations, petrography, and structure, the Belle Cote Road gneiss appears to be intrusive into the metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks of the Jumping Brook metamorphic suite. This is contrary to the belief of some that the Belle Cote Road gneiss was unconformably overlain by the Jumping Brook metamorphic suite. It can be concluded that the orthogneiss may well represent simply deformed plutonic rocks, in which intrusion and deformation were syn-tectonic with respect to each other. Metamorphic grade increases toward the orthogneiss from all directions in the area, including the Jumping Brook metamorphic suite which has been interpreted as having formed in an island arc setting (Connors, 1986). This strongly suggests that the thermal anomaly causing metamorphism was associated with the intrusion. Keywords: Pages: 101 Supervisor: Becky Jamieson

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