Canadian Shield | Definition, Location, Map, Landforms, & Facts

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External Websites

• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Canadian Shield
• Lakehead University - Prehistory of the Canadian Shield
• Denison Digital Commons - The Case of Ancient Lost Rocks: The Migration of Canadian Shield Rocks to Ohio (PDF)
• College of DuPage Digital Press - North America: Physical Geography I � The Canadian Shield
• Canadian Geographic - Behind the Canadian Shield
• One Earth - Canadian Shield and Coastal Taiga-Forests (NA9)

Britannica Websites Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.

• Canadian Shield - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Ask the Chatbot a Question Also known as: Canadian continental shield, Canadian-Greenland Shield, Laurentian Shield, Precambrian Shield(Show More) Written and fact-checked by Britannica Editors Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Britannica Editors Last updated Nov. 7, 2025 •History Table of Contents Table of Contents Ask the Chatbot

Canadian Shield, one of the world’s largest geologic continental shields, centred on Hudson Bay and extending for 8 million square km (3 million square miles) over eastern, central, and northwestern Canada from the Great Lakes to the Canadian Arctic and into Greenland, with small extensions into northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York, U.S.

The Canadian Shield constitutes the largest mass of exposed Precambrian rock on the face of Earth. The region, as a whole, is composed of ancient crystalline rocks whose complex structure attests to a long history of uplift and depression, mountain building (orogeny), and erosion. Some of the ancient mountain ranges can still be recognized as a ridge or belt of hills, but the present appearance of the physical landscape of the Canadian Shield is not so much a result of the folding and faulting and compression of the rocks millions of years ago as it is the work of ice in relatively recent geologic time. During the Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), the vast continental glaciers that covered northern North America had this region as a centre. The ice, in moving to the south, scraped the land bare of its overlying mantle of weathered rock. Some of this material was deposited on the shield when the ice melted, but the bulk of it was carried southward to be deposited south and southwest of the Canadian Shield.

The resulting surface consists of rocky, ice-smoothed hills with an average relief of 30 metres (100 feet), together with irregular basins, which are mostly filled by lakes or swamps. In places the old mountain ranges may be recognized by hills several hundreds of metres in height. The northeastern portion, however, became tilted up so that, in northern Labrador and Baffin Island, the land rises to more than 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) above sea level.

More From Britannica Canada: The Canadian Shield The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.