The Upper Devonian and Lower Mississippian(?) Kanayut Conglomerate, which crops out for a distance of 950 km across the Brooks Range, is significant for understanding of the tectonic history of northern Alaska in relation to the geology of the circum-Arctic region. The Kanayut Conglomerate is as thick as 3,000 m and consists chiefly of conglomeratic fluvial strata that were deposited as a result of southwestward progradation of a large and coarse-grained fluvial-dominated delta. Underlying and overlying shallow marine and prodeltaic strata record the advance and retreat of the delta. The Kanayut and related deposits crop out in a series of thrust sheets in which the Paleozoic rocks were detached in the late Mesozoic from an unknown basement and transported at least severa hundred kilometers northward. Detailed sedimentologic studies and measured sections in the Kanayut Conglomerate permit estimates to be made of the amount of displacement on the thrust sheets and suggest that the source area of the allochthonous middle Paleozoic deltaic deposits was the underlying autochthonous upper Precambrian and lower Paleozoic basement rocks of the North Slope.

The Kanayut Conglomerate is not palinspastically compatible with other middle Paleozoic successions in Alaska, in the cordillera of western Canada, in the conterminous western U.S., or in the Canadian Arctic Islands. The strata do, however, resemble fluvial deposits of the Old Red Sandstone in Svalbard and East Greenland. They and their associated autochthonous basement may have been displaced from an original position contiguous with the North Greenland foldbelt by post-Early Mississippian strike-slip faulting and thus indicate an early phase of circum-Arctic tectonic displacement prior to that associated with the opening of the modern Canada basin in the late Mesozoic.

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