The Davis Strait (Danish: Davisstrædet) is a southern arm of the Arctic Ocean that lies north of the Labrador Sea.
The Davis Strait is underlain by complex geological features of buried grabens (basins) and ridges, formed by strike-slip faulting of the Ungava Fault Zone during Paleogene times about 45 million to 62 million years ago.
The strike-slip faulting transferred plate-tectonic motions in the Labrador Sea to Baffin Bay.
With a water depth of between one and two thousand meters the strait is substantially shallower than the Labrador Sea to the south.
[2][3] This has led Greenland's minister and provincial council to offer a large number of off-shore concessions to potential hydrocarbon (oil and gas) extraction.