Tektonika : The Community-Led Diamond Open-Access Journal for Tectonics and Structural Geology

Acknowledgements First and foremost, we would like to thank the tectonics and structural geology community for embracing this initiative from the start. Their feedback, enthusiasm, and passion about DOA were essential to the launch of Tektonika. The success of Tektonika would not be possible without our Associate Editors, who volunteered their time to support the editorial process, the authors, who trusted us with their research, and the reviewers, who agreed to provide their invaluable peer-review. These three pillars of the publishing system made the publication of this first issue possible. We would like to thank the University of Aberdeen, especially the Department of Geology and Geophysics in the School of Geosciences, for supporting Tektonika financially and morally. We are also grateful to Volcanica and its team for leading the way and sharing with us their know-how to set up a community-led DOAJ. Fabian Wadsworth (Volcanica) and Stephen Hicks (Seismica) are thanked for reviewing this editorial and providing valuable feedback and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Tectono-stratigraphic evolution and crustal architecture of the Orphan Basin during North Atlantic rifting

The Orphan Basin is located in the deep offshore of the Newfoundland margin, and it is bounded by the continental shelf to the west, the Grand Banks to the south, and the continental blocks of Orphan Knoll and Flemish Cap to the east. The Orphan Basin formed in Mesozoic time during the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean between eastern Canada and western Iberia–Europe. This work, based on well data and regional seismic reflection profiles across the basin, indicates that the continental crust was affected by several extensional episodes between the Jurassic and the Early Cretaceous, separated by events of uplift and erosion. The preserved tectono-stratigraphic sequences in the basin reveal that deformation initiated in the eastern part of the Orphan Basin in the Jurassic and spread towards the west in the Early Cretaceous, resulting in numerous rift structures filled with a Jurassic–Lower Cretaceous syn-rift succession and overlain by thick Upper Cretaceous to Cenozoic post-rift sediments. The seismic data show an extremely thinned crust (4–16 km thick) underneath the eastern and western parts of the Orphan Basin, forming two sub-basins separated by a wide structural high with a relatively thick crust (17 km thick). Quantifying the crustal architecture in the basin highlights the large discrepancy between brittle extension localized in the upper crust and the overall crustal thinning. This suggests that continental deformation in the Orphan Basin involved, in addition to the documented Jurassic and Early Cretaceous rifting, an earlier brittle rift phase which is unidentifiable in seismic data and a depth-dependent thinning of the crust driven by localized lower crust ductile flow