ABSTRACT

The Bjorne Formation represents the Early Triassic marginal facies of the upper Paleozoic to Tertiary Sverdrup Basin of the Canadian Artic Archipelago. On northwestern Melville Island, the formation forms a prograding fan-shaped delta characterized by concentric lithofacies. Paleocurrent indicators in 59 localities consist of the dip azimuths of planar foresets and the axes of spoon-shaped troughs with frequency distributions that can be approximated by the Gaussian normal model. The locality averages of the two features point in nearly the same directions, but the spread of the foreset dip-azimuths (average local variance 1109 degrees²) is wider than that of the trough axes (927 degrees²). Trend analysis by the method of least squares is applied to locality aver ges for the combined features. The paleocurrent trends are evaluated for the linear polynomial equation and a graphical method is presented which can be extended to the cases of higher order polynomial equations.