The German Arctic research program CASE: overview, results, perspectives

The programme CASE (Circum-Arctic Structural Events) is an Arctic geoscientific research programme organised by the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR). In close cooperation with scientists from the Arctic countries, geodynamic investigations were carried out since 1992 in onshore coastal areas of the Arctic Ocean, from Arctic Canada through North Greenland and Svalbard to northern Russia and Siberia. Activities include 13 onshore expeditions, several aero-geophysical campaigns and one offshore marine cruise on related research targets. The onshore investigations are linked with existing and current marine geophysical work and are particularly aimed to provide structural, stratigraphic and volcanological information useful for the interpretation of the marine data of the large Arctic shelf areas. As a basic pre-requisite, the investigated geodynamic elements, orogens, intra-plate mobile belts and continental transform faults have to fit in the existing plate-tectonic set-up. Results of over 20 years of research in the region, always in international cooperation, are presented in this review. They include an in depth analysis of the Eurekan mobile belt structurally linking Arctic Canada, Greenland and Svalbard, the structural and chronologic confirmation of the Wegener Fault in the Nares Strait, a model for the movements of the Greenland plate during the Cenozoic as cause for the observed deformational belts, and the role of the Caledonian Pearya Terrane at the northern coast of Ellesmere Island.