Jogvan Hansen

Seafloor extension/stretching and associated rifting in the North Atlantic Area, which started in Early Paleogene times (From ~62 Ma), were rather complex affairs in their entireties. The pre-rift North Atlantic area was a patchwork of continental geological terrains being ‘wreckages’ from the closure of the ancient Iapetus Ocean. Current offshore areas in the North Atlantic known to harbour such ancient ‘sunken’ continental crust include the ‘Faroe Islands - Rockall Plateau micro-continent’, the ‘Jan Mayen micro-continent’, continental terranes beneath the Vøring- and Møre highs offshore West Norway and possibly also continental terranes below parts of Icelandic basalts. Published isotopic evidences for offshore continental materials (basement) of the North Atlantic are sparse, but some isotopic data exist for the Rockall Plateau, or more precisely the Rockall Bank. In this work contaminated basaltic rocks of the Faroe Islands, together with comparable materials from the NW margin of the Hatton bank are compared and contrasted with isotopic data for basement rocks of the Rockall Bank. The results for basaltic materials from at least one of the Faroese sills strongly suggest contamination with continental materials with isotopic lead compositions comparable to those reported for the Rockall Bank.