This paper presents an overview of the field research conducted during the 2001 season, along with preliminary field observations, from the second year of the Committee Bay Project's Quaternary studies. The objectives of these studies are to compile high-resolution terrain inventories for the Laughland Lake, Walker Lake, Arrowsmith River, and Ellice Hills map areas of central Nunavut; to begin a reconnaissance-scale drift prospecting program that utilizes both heavy-mineral & till geochemical analyses; and to interpret the glacial history at local & regional scales. After introductory sections on regional geology, previous research, and sampling & survey methods, the paper summarizes preliminary results from field observations regarding generalized ice movements & glacial landforms.

The Slave Province is a relatively small but well-exposed Archean craton in the north-west part of the Canadian Shield. Mapping of quartzite & banded iron formation occurrences throughout the Province since the 1970s has resulted in the conclusion that the overall topology of all greenstone belts in the central & western parts of the Province permits all such occurrences to be correlated into a single cover sequence, the Central Slave Cover Group. Following a brief historical overview, this paper presents field evidence for the discovery & successful correlation of that cover sequence across much of the craton. It then presents detrital zircon data to bolster this correlation, in particular to show that what was earlier mapped as a Paleoproterozoic cover sequence in central Wopmay Orogen is in fact part of the Central Slave Cover Group. The extension of the Cover Group into the north-western Slave Province have implications for the architecture & evolution of continental crust older than 2.85 billion years.

This report includes a series of papers on radiogenic age and isotopic studies in the Arctic using uranium-lead and argon40-argon39 methods of age determination and neodymium-isotopic methods.