Continents and Supercontinents

by Rogers, John J. W.; Santosh, M.

• ISBN13: 9780195165890
• ISBN10: 0195165896
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-09-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

To this day, there is a great amount of controversy about where, when and how the so-called supercontinents--Pangea, Godwana, Rodinia, and Columbia--were made and broken. Continents and Supercontinents frames that controversy by giving all the necessary background on how continental crust is formed, modified, and destroyed, and what forces move plates. It also discusses how these processes affect the composition of seawater, climate, and the evolution of life. Rogers and Santosh begin with a survey of plate tectonics, and go on to describe the composition, production, and destruction of continental and oceanic crust, and show that cratons or assemblies of cratons became the first true continents, approximately one billion years after the earliest continental crust evolved. The middle part of the book concentrates on supercontinents, beginning with a discussion of types of orogenic belts, distinguishing those that formed by closure of an ocean basin within the belt and those that formed by intracontinental deformation caused by stresses generated elsewhere. This information permits discrimination between models of supercontinent formation by accretion of numerous small terranes and by reorganization of large old continental blocks. This background leads to a description of the assembly and fragmentation of supercontinents throughout earth history. The record is most difficult to interpret for the oldest supercontinent, Columbia, and also controversial for Rodinia, the next youngest supercontinent. The configurations and pattern of breakup of Gondwana and Pangea are well known, but some aspects of their assembly are unclear. The book also briefly describes the histories of continents after the breakup of Pangea, and discusses how changes in the composition of seawater, climate, and life may have been affected by the sizes and locations of continents and supercontinents.

Author Biography

M. Santosh was became Professor in Natural Environmental Science at Kochi University, Japan, in 2000 and was the coleader of the UNESCO-IUGSIGCP project on Proterozoic Events in East Gondwana.

Table of Contents

Continental Drift

The Road to Plate Tectonics

Plate Tectonics Now and in the Past n

Creation, Destruction, and Changes in Volume of Continental Crust through Time

Growth of Cratons and Their Post-Stabilization Histories

Assembly of Continents and Establishment of Lower Crust and Upper Mantle

Assembly and Dispersal of Supercontinents

Supercontinents Older Than Gondwana

Gondwana and Pangea

Rifting of Pangea and Formation of Present Ocean Basins

History of Continents after Rifting from Pangea

Effects of Continents and Supercontinents on Climate

Effects of Continents and Supercontinents on Organic Evolution

Seismic Methods

Heat Flow and Thermal Gradients

Paleomagnetism

Isotopic Systems

Cratons

Anorogenic Magmatic Suites

Orogenic Belts of Grenville Age

Orogenic Belts of 2.1-1.3-Ga Age

Orogenic Belts of Pan-African-Brasiliano Age

References

Author Index

Subject Index

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