Proposed Title 1: - Queen's University

The Beaverlodge area is part of the Churchill province, which is located in the
northwest section of the North American shield (Fig. 2.1). The Churchill province is
subdivided into the Rae and Hearne domains separated by the ca. 1.91-1.90 Ga Snowbird
Tectonic Zone (Hoffman, 1990; Hanmer et al., 1995) and bordered to the northwest by the
ca. 1.99-1.92 Ga Taltson-Thelon Orogen (Thériault, 1992; McNicoll et al., 2000) and to the
southeast by the ca. 1.9-1.8 Ga Trans-Hudson Orogen (Ansdell and Yang, 1995). The
Beaverlodge area lies within the southwestern Rae province (Fig. 2.1) and comprises
Neoarchean to Mesoproterozoic rocks that can be broadly divided into four packages (Fig.
2.2): (1) Neoarchean basement granitoid and gneiss (Hartlaub et al., 2006); (2) variably
deformed and metamorphosed Neoarchean to Paleoproterozoic Murmac Bay Group rocks
(Hartlaub and Ashton, 1998; Hartlaub et al., 2004a) that uncomformably overlie the
basement rocks; (3) Paleoproterozoic siliciclastic red-bed sedimentary rocks and associated
alkaline to sub-alkaline volcanic rocks known as the Martin Lake Basin (Hendry, 1983;
Morelli et al., 2001, 2009). Martin Lake Group basal conglomerates directly overlie
quartzites of the Murmac Bay Group and argillaceous rocks of the Thluicho Lake Group
(Scott, 1978, Hunter et al., 2003, 2004; Yeo, 2005) at angular unconformities in the western
Beaverlodge Domain and along the northern shore of Lake Athabasca, respectively (Ashton
et al., 2009), and (4) Mesoproterozoic sedimentary rocks of the Athabasca Group (Rainbird
et al., 2007) that uncomformably overlie Martin Lake Basin rocks.
The basement complex comprises a number of granitoids including the Elliot Bay
(3014±10 Ma; Persons, 1983), Lodge Bay (3060±40 Ma; O’Hanley, et al., 1991), and
Cornwall Bay (2999±7 Ma; Hartlaub et al., 2004a) granites. The unconformity between the
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