Tectonic Globaloney: Closing Arguments

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© 2012 N. Christian Smoot. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 5/24/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1143-4 (sc)

           978-1-4772-3647-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012909196

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

1. DERIVATION OF THE PRIMARY TECTONIC WORKING HYPOTHESIS

2. THEORETICAL EARTH: CONTINENTAL DRIFT AND OROGENIES

3. GEOMETRY, GEOGRAPHY, AND GEOLOGY SINCE 1966

4. FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FIELD

6. PALEOBIOGEOGRAPHY: UNPUBLISHED DATA

7. ODP RESULTS UPDATED AND GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

8. CONCLUSIONS

9. ACCUMULATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Since about 1966 the Earth geodynamics/tectonics field has been pretty much ruled by the plate tectonic hypothesis. This was a diversion from the previous hypothesis of uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism was unable to explain many phenomena, such as earthquake predictability and when volcanoes would erupt. Both of these were considered to be deleterious to us humans. The great minds of the day built upon each other’s ideas and plate tectonic hypothesis evolved from those efforts. Almost 50 years later, this idea is still in vogue, having undergone many permutations on its own; in fact, almost at will as newer surveys yielded newer results on the ocean floor. It is to this that this treatise is addressed as an adjunct to the original Tectonic Globaloney published in 2004.

Much new information has been gathered and published in various venues, some even by myself. All taken into consideration, a follow-up expanding upon the original Tectonic Globaloney would not be remiss, especially from an old warhorse who spent many years in the trenches of truth, trying to make a difference in the usual modus operandi of the world of tectonics and geodynamics, a world which has repeatedly taken more sharp left turns than should have been allowed by a more scholarly readership, a readership which has for the most part followed the leader, whoever that may have been. In this case, I think it is academia closely nursing at the breast of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in a publish-or-perish atmosphere engendered by the universities.

The original 2004 edition included a very brief synopsis of the derivation of the plate tectonic hypothesis followed by field data that had been neglected since the great epiphany. Midocean ridges and convergent margins were discussed along with geology and geophysics in a very cursory form, essentially an introduction to many of the problems surrounding that hypothesis. The conclusion, based on the megatrend concept, left us with a hollow feeling, one similar to building a castle in the sand--uh-oh, here comes a good sized wave!

Sometimes we all need a boost, or a reminder, of from whence we have come and towards which we are going. In this case, this compilation includes many of the papers I have published since the original book. They tend to expand on many of the subjects just touched on in the first. Free use of the Internet, sometimes in the form of an updated definition or a diagram, is interjected when I felt that it was a necessary adjunct.

As is with anything published in a vanity press, I have made free use also of some of my sea tales. these are usually in italics so as not to interfere with any science which may be present. Otherwise, the papers are presented here in toto.

1. DERIVATION OF THE PRIMARY TECTONIC WORKING HYPOTHESIS

A rather cursory synopsis of the evolution of the current working hypothesis, that of plate tectonics, seems like a reasonable beginning point. This topic has been beaten to death by everyone, and every nationality has it’s own version of the evolution of this hypothesis. But an occasional new lead helps to fill the plate, so to speak; I have tried to be a little more cosmopolitan than many I have seen:

Before coming to its senses, the field of geology, along with almost every other field, was closely guarded by religion. In the case of earth’s age, that was figured during the 1600s by Irish Bishop James Ussher to have been formed on Sunday, 3 October 4004 BC. Others approached that figure, and there things lay until the 1700s.

Coming into the present day, the geologic framework of Earth’s tectonics was basically that of uniformitarianism. James Hutton stated that geology could not be based on cosmogony in Concerning the System of the Earth, its Duration, and Stability (1785), a paper addressed to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He saw that the present rocks must have been formed from older rocks, that these rocks laid down under the sea were consolidated under great pressure and raised by upheaval, and that masses of molten rock were injected into the rents caused by these great upheavals. Additionally, all rocks exposed to the surface must undergo decay until everywhere was worn away uniformly into consolidated sediments.

The Principles of Geology books by Charles Lyell (1830, 1832, and 1833), another Scottish geologist, theorized that geological change was slow and gradual rather than catastrophic, and that this idea was promoted as that of uniformitarianism (Figure 1). This basically expanded upon Hutton’s ideas while popularizing them. He travelled extensively on the continent. As a result, he proposed changing the geologic time scale to include the Piocene, Miocene, and Eocene in the Tertiary Period. He gave the preliminary ideas about what caused earthquakes.

Figure 1. Initial idea about uniformitarianism. Start where you want and follow the trend (Wikipedia).

By the mid-19th century James Dwight Dana and James Hall, American geologists, developed the geosyncline hypothesis (Figure 2) whereby uniformitarianism was coupled with a gradually cooling and shrinking Earth, and this was widely accepted for the next hundred or so years as the backbone of Earth tectonics, which, all things considered, is a pretty long run for any hypothesis.

One last very important idea is that of isostacy. Originally presented in 1889 by Clarence Edward Dutton, an American geologist, isostasy refers to the state of gravitational equilibrium between the earth’s lithosphere and asthenosphere such that the lithosphere floats at an elevation which depends on its thickness and density. This concept is invoked to explain how different topographic heights, such as mountain ranges, can exist at the Earth’s surface. When a certain area of lithosphere reaches the state of isostasy, it is said to be in isostatic equilibrium. Isostasy is not a process that upsets equilibrium, but rather one which restores it, such as isostatic rebound. Isostatic compensation is defined as the process in which lateral transport at the surface of the earth by erosion or deposition is compensated by lateral movements in a subcrustal layer. This is also known as isostatic adjustment; isostatic correction. It is generally accepted that the earth is a dynamic system that responds to loads in many different ways. However, isostasy provides an important ‘view’ of the processes that are happening in areas that are experiencing vertical movement.

Vertical tectonism became the order of the day, with erosion wearing down mountains, giant sedimentary basins forming, and isostatic compensation uplifting mountains again through thrust faulting. The rising and falling of great pieces of real estate allowed for marine transgressions, such as the North American Western Interior Seaway, whose last remnants include the Salton Sea and Great Salt Lake.

Figure 2. Typical geosyncline in which the idea was forwarded by Dana that the gradual deepening and filling basin resulting from his concept of crustal contraction due to a cooling and contracting Earth (Wikipedia). This idea is anathema to all expansion ideas, by the way.

Problematically though, the foregone explanations did little to explain earthquakes (or predict them), catastrophic volcanoes such as Mt. St. Helens (again, or predict them), deep ocean trenches such as those in the NW Pacific basin, and the apparent fit of some continents (keep these in mind). And now for the short history of the latest paradigm shift. According to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962) it must be accurate, consistent, broad in scope, simple, and fruitful. Apparently it also constitutes a major leap forward in a non-linear progression.

Here is where a meteorologist came into the picture. In a 1915 book called The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Alfred Wegener introduced the idea of continental drift by juxtaposing eastern South America into the western African continental margin. This idea was relegated to the crackpot bin where it sat until a later time.

And now the geophysicists take over. Kiyoo Wadati plotted the deep earthquakes around Japan (1927), and his relation of maximum surface displacement to distance from the epicenter allowed Charles Richter to develop his earthquake magnitude scale (1935). Alexander du Toit carried Wegener’s idea forward with his Our Wandering Continents (1937) after he compared the geology of Africa and South America. He also introduced the idea of two super-continents and a Tethys Sea. Arthur Holmes, a British geologist, was a pioneer of geochronology in 1911. In 1944 his book Principles of Physical Geology ended with a chapter devoted to continental drift. Part of that explanation was the start of the seafloor spreading concept. With Beno Gutenburg, Richter predicted that Earth was a series of plates separated by active seismic belts (1949). At the same time, Hugo Benioff deciphered the deep earthquakes around the Pacific basin as being great thrust faults. Mason Diblee and Thomas Hill (1953) noted large horizontal displacements on Earth’s surface along the San Andreas Fault.

And, in 1955 Bill Menard discovered large fracture zones in the North Pacific, work which was verified by Ron Mason when he noticed that extensive magnetic patterns on the ocean floor ended abruptly. This was based on his work on the ship Pioneer. Soon after, Keith Runcorn used magnetic pole displacement based on 180 Ma rock samples to show that North America had been displaced from Europe, and this figure became the baseline age for the oldest ocean floor extant.

Finally, in 1960, Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp showed profiles of the Atlantic basin from US Navy surveys. Someone actually took the time to look at the ocean floor to see what it had to say. After all, it did speak for about 70% of Earth’s surface. These showed the dynamic state of ocean floors with emphasis on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Harry Hess took the ball and ran with his 1960 paper, History of the Ocean Basins. Expanding on Hess’ ideas, Tuzo Wilson carried them further when he (1963) developed the idea of hotspots and the creation of sequentially aged island chains as the plate moved over the hotspot. Initially, this idea was so radical it too was also relegated to the loony bin. (Now it is a mainstay of plate tectonics.) Alan Cox, R.R. Doell, and Brent Dalrymple developed a paleomagnetic time scale using a mass spectrometer. Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews at the same time (1963) expanded on Mason’s earlier magnetic anomaly studies, and Tuzo Wilson (1965) showed that the magnetic anomalies offset along transform faults on their formation rather than after the magnetic signature had been imprinted.

The transform faults proved to be the key, and the plate tectonic revolution was under way. At a 1966 Geological Society of America meeting in San Fransisco, Lynn Sykes proved Wilson’s hypothesis by studying earthquake motion, and Fred Vine tied it all together.

Midocean ridges became the spreading centers. The shallow earthquakes were caused by the rising magma to the surface from the asthenosphere. The newly formed oceanic crust cools, subsides, and ages as it moves away from that center, and this was called ridge push. The rate is generally measured in centimeters per year (cm/yr). In about 180 million years that crust, or plate, arrives at a convergent margin. The deep earthquakes and great thrust faults became the descending plate at the Wadati-Benioff subduction zones. The leading edge of the descending slab remelted into the lithosphere only to move back out to the midocean ridges in the form of liquid magma to pour forth again onto the surface to create new lithosphere. This is sometimes called slab pull (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Plate tectonic hypothesis in a nutshell (Wikipedia).

Earth was considered to be made up of a series of lithospheric plates that were separated by seismic belts. Oceanic crust is about 7 km thick, while the lithosphere is about 80 km thick because that measurement includes the upper mantle. The older continental cratons are mere passengers in all this activity, they being hundreds of kilometers thick and unable to subduct. The plates slide past each other in a strike-slip action, leaving parallel ridge and trough scars on the ocean floor called fracture zones. These are Earth’s great cooling cracks, and they, by definition, point the direction of seafloor spreading.

Figure 4. Hypothetical plate boundaries defined by divergent midocean ridge boundaries and convergent subduction zone and collision margins where 1=African rift, 2-Carlsberg Ridge, 3=Mid-Indian Ridge, 4=Southeast Indian Ridge, 5=Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, 6=East Pacific Rise, 7=Chile Rise, 8=Galapagos/Carnegie Ridge, 9=Gorda/Endeavor/Juan de Fuca Ridges, 10=Lau-Harve Ridge, 11=Mariana Trough, 12=Southwest Indian Ridge, 13=Atlantic-Indian Ridge, 14=Scotia Arc, 15=Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 16=Reykjanes Ridge, 17=Mohns Ridge, 18=Cayman Trough.

The number of plates fluctuates almost daily, so an accurate count is almost impossible. The twelve larger ones are: North and South American, Eurasian, Pacific, African, Indian-Australian, Philippine, Antarctic, Caribbean, Scotia, Cocos, and Nazca.

2. THEORETICAL EARTH: CONTINENTAL DRIFT AND OROGENIES

As the plates wander about and converge, three possibilities occur. An oceanic crust-oceanic crust collision, a oceanic crust-continental crust collision resulting in subduction of the oceanic crust, and a continent-continent collision, resulting in an orogeny. In an attempt to explain the existence of across-ocean rock types, the idea of continental drift was extensively applied. The following is the result of many years of plate-tectonic interpretation of that continental drift. Notice here that the key word is continent:

Orogenies have been used extensively in plate tectonics to explain many mountain ranges. These have taken the place of that occupied by uniformitarianism. As an example, North and South America were built by a series of orogenies. The earliest that I can find is the Algoman Orogeny which ended about 2.5 Ga (billion years ago) after 100 Ma (million years) of activity and brought the Archaen to a close. This activity was from South Dakota to Lake Huron.

This hypothetical scenario is freely adapted from the Internet’s Wikipedia sites with occasional modifications and/or comments:

Around 1.85 Ga the Penokean Orogeny built the major portion of North America’s central region. This was followed by the Antler Orogeny between Utah and Nevada. Co-evally during the Late Proterozoic to Early Paleozoic the world’s longest terrestrial mountain chain was being built, the proto-Andes Mountains in South America. This long-lived event continues to this day, with modern construction beginning during the Triassic Era.

Beginning in Cambrian time, about 550 million years ago (Figure 5), the Iapetus Ocean began to grow progressively narrower. The weight of accumulating sediments, in addition to compressional forces in the crust, forced the eastern edge of the North American continent to fold gradually downward. In this manner, shallow-water carbonate deposition that had persisted on the continental shelf margin through Late Cambrian (Furongian 499-488 Ma) into Early Ordovician (Tremadocian 480 Ma) time penetrated further inland.

The result was the Taconic orogeny, a mountain building period that ended 440 million years ago and affected most of modern-day New England. A great mountain chain formed from eastern Canada down through what is now the Piedmont of the east coast of the United States. As the mountain chain eroded in the Silurian and Devonian eras, sediments from the mountain chain spread throughout the present-day Appalachians and mid-continental North America.

Figure 5. Dream sheet of Gaea’s perambulations, meeting her different mates by continental drift. Where and when she stops is explained in the text. The figures are the product of the ongoing PALEOMAP project, headed by Chris Scotese. The reconstructions are aligned relative to the spin axis and based on paleomagnetic data supplied by Rob van der Voo. The hot spot framework is from R.D. Mueller.

During the Ordovician (c488-c444 Ma), the southern continents were collected into a single continent called Gondwana. Gondwana started the period in equatorial latitudes and, as the period progressed, drifted toward the South Pole. Early in the Ordovician, the continents Laurentia (present-day North America), Siberia, and Baltica (present-day northern Europe) were still independent continents (since the break-up of the super-continent Pannotia earlier), but Baltica began to move towards Laurentia later in the period, causing the Iapetus Ocean to shrink between them. The small continent Avalonia separated from Gondwana and began to head north towards Baltica and Laurentia. The Rheic Ocean between Gondwana and Avalonia was formed as a result.

The Taconic orogeny that was well under way in Cambrian times gave way to fine-grained clastic deposition and deeper water conditions during the Middle Ordovician. In this period a convergent plate boundary developed along the eastern edge of a small island chain. Crustal material beneath the Iapetus Ocean sank into the mantle along a subduction zone with an eastward-dipping orientation. Partial melting of the down-going plate produced magma that returned to the surface to form the offshore Taconic island arc.

In the beginning of the Late Ordovician, from 460 to 450 Ma, volcanoes along the margin of the Iapetus Ocean spewed massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, turning the planet into a hothouse. These volcanic island arcs eventually collided with proto-North America to form the Appalachian mountains.

By the Late Ordovician, this island arc had collided with the North American continent. The sedimentary and igneous rock between the land masses were intensely folded and faulted, and were subjected to varying degrees of intense metamorphism. This was the final episode of the Taconic Orogeny. By the end of the Late Ordovician these volcanic emissions had stopped. Gondwana had by that time neared or approached the pole and was largely glaciated.

When the Taconic Orogeny subsided during Late Ordovician time (about 440 million years ago), subduction ended, culminating in the accretion of the Iapetus Terrane onto the eastern margin of the continent. This resulted in the formation of a great mountain range throughout New England and eastern Canada, and perhaps to a lesser degree, southward along the region that is now the Piedmont of eastern North America. The newly expanded continental margin gradually stabilized. Erosion continued to strip away sediments from upland areas. Inland seas covering the Midcontinent gradually expanded eastward into the New York Bight region and became the site of shallow clastic and carbonate deposition. This tectonically-quiet period persisted until the Late Devonian time (about 360 million years ago) when the next period of mountain-building began, the Acadian orogeny.

At the same time, the Caledonian orogeny is a mountain building era recorded in the northern parts of the British Isles, the Scandinavian Mountains, Svalbard, eastern Greenland and parts of north-central Europe. The Caledonian orogeny encompasses events that occurred from the Ordovician to Early Devonian, roughly 490-390 Ma. It was caused by the closure of the Iapetus Ocean when the continents and terranes of Laurentia, Baltica and Avalonia collided. The name Caledonian can not be used for an absolute period of geological time, it applies only to a series of tectonically related events.

Some early phases of deformation