A structural interpretation across part of the northern Rocky Mountains, British Columbia, Canada

The northern Canadian Rocky Mountains, as exemplified by the Halfway River map-area (94B) in British Columbia, consists of a rugged and mountainous structurally complex Foothills subprovince of large amplitude box and chevron-style folds in rocks of late Paleozoic and Mesozoic age, and a structurally diverse Rocky Mountain subprovince with open folds and apparently inconspicuous thrust faults in upper Precambrian to upper Paleozoic rocks; separating them is a narrow topographically subdued and heavily vegetated 'transition interval' comprising more penetratively folded and faulted shales and thin-bedded carbonate rocks of late Devonian and Mississippian age.Flat thrust faults, with displacements in the order of 10 km, which occur under the eastern margin of the Rocky Mountain subprovince (mountain front) extend across the 'transition interval' and beneath the western margin of the Foothills subprovince. These faults terminate within a décollement along the Devonian and Mississippian Besa River shale, as the displacement on them is transformed into disharmonic kink-type box and chevron folds in overlying units and into tectonic thickening within the Besa River shale. Because most of the major thrust faults along the Rocky Mountains are 'blind' and cannot be traced to surface exposures, one is left with the erroneous impression that very little lateral displacement (foreshortening) has occurred in the northern Canadian Rocky Mountains.The basic change from a well organized thrust-fault terrane in the southern Rockies to a more diverse fold terrane with few large mappable thrusts in the north is consistent with changes in the stratigraphic character of the rock prism that was deformed: the proportion of thick incompetent shale units increases northward, and major lateral carbonate to shale facies transitions traverse the eastern margin of the Rocky Mountain subprovince.Despite the differences in structural style from south to north, strain patterns within the northern Rocky Mountains are consistent with the lateral eastward movement of a detached prism of sedimentary rocks, and support the basic tenets of thin-skinned tectonics.