Geology of Sweden
Overview of the geology of Sweden
The geology of Sweden is the regional study of rocks, minerals, tectonics, natural resources and groundwater in the country. The oldest rocks in Sweden date to more than 2.5 billion years ago in the Precambrian. Complex orogeny mountain building events and other tectonic occurrences built up extensive metamorphic crystalline basement rock that often contains valuable metal deposits throughout much of the country. Metamorphism continued into the Paleozoic after the Snowball Earth glaciation as the continent Baltica collided with an island arc and then the continent Laurentia. Sedimentary rocks are most common in southern Sweden with thick sequences from the last 250 million years underlying Malmö and older marine sedimentary rocks forming the surface of Gotland.
Stratigraphy, tectonics and geologic history
The oldest rocks in Sweden date to the Archean, more than 2.5 billion years ago. Archean crystalline basement rocks are restricted to a few areas in the far north and are mainly orthogneiss and paragneiss migmatite. Relatively few age studies had been conducted on the rocks by the late 1990s, although they are interpreted as being more than 2.7 billion years old. Studies on younger Paleoproterozoic intrusions in the Skellefte district suggest that the intrusions derived from the Archean parent rock along a line stretching 100 kilometers northeast from the area. However, in south-central and southeast Sweden, the younger rock does not appear to derive from the Archean rocks.
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This entry incorporates text from “Geology of Sweden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.