Structural testing of tectonic hypotheses by field-based analysis of distributed tangential shear: examples from major high-strain zones in the Grenville Province and other parts of the southern Canadian Shield

The Grenville Province and other parts of the Canadian Shield contain major (>100 km long) high-strain zones, also called shear belts or ductile shear zones, that are hosted by heterogeneously deformed gneisses and schists. In well-exposed segments of three nontabular zones whose dip angle is known locally, at the erosion level and (or) in the shallow subsurface, we investigate the tangential shear strain (better called the tangential unit …