The Queen Elizabeth Islands Subplate is a triangular tectonic block of the

North American Plate The North American Plate is a tectonic plate covering most of North America, Cuba, the Bahamas, extreme northeastern Asia, and parts of Iceland and the Azores. With an area of , it is the Earth's second largest tectonic plate, behind the Pacif ...

containing the Queen Elizabeth Islands of Northern Canada. It is surrounded on the south and southwest by the Parry Rift Valley, on the east by the Nares Rift Valley and on the north and west by the Kaltag Fault, which form part of the Canadian Arctic Rift System. The Queen Elizabeth Islands Subplate formed in the mid-

Tertiary Tertiary ( ) is a widely used but obsolete term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start ...

during the final stages of the Eurekan Rifting Episode when a large triangular region became severed from the rest of the North American continent. It consists of a number of smaller subplates that are separated by faults. The faults controlled the shapes of the subplates which in turn determined the shapes of the present day islands.

References

Tectonic plates Geology of the Northwest Territories Geology of Nunavut Geology of the Arctic Ocean Queen Elizabeth Islands {{Tectonics-stub