A historical account of how continental drift and plate tectonics provided the framework for our current understanding of palaeogeography

Abstract

Palaeogeography is the cartographic representation of the past distribution of geographic features such as deep oceans, shallow seas, lowlands, rivers, lakes and mountain belts on palinspastically restored plate tectonic base maps. It is closely connected with plate tectonics which grew from an earlier theory of continental drift and is largely responsible for creating and structuring the Earth's lithosphere. Today, palaeogeography is an integral part of the Earth sciences curriculum. Commonly, with some exceptions, only the most recent state of research is presented; the historical aspects of how we actually came to the insights which we take for granted are rarely discussed, if at all. It is remarkable how much was already known about the changing face of the Earth more than three centuries before the theory of plate tectonics, despite the fact that most of our present analytical tools or our models were unavailable then. Here, we aim to present a general conspectus from the dawn of ‘palaeogeography’ in the 16th century onwards. Special emphasis is given to innovative ideas and scientific milestones, supplemented by memorable anecdotes, which helped to advance the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics, and finally led to the establishment of palaeogeography as a recognized discipline of the Earth sciences.

An Atlas of Phanerozoic Paleogeographic Maps: The Seas Come In and the Seas Go Out

“…A paleogeographic reconstruction shows the locations of the ancient shorelines. A complete paleogeographic reconstruction also shows the paleotopography of the continents and paleobathymetry of the ocean basins (Figure 1c) and may show the locations of ancient lakes, rivers, deltas, and other geographic features (for an annotated bibliography of key paleogeographic atlases and publications, see Supplemental Appendix 1) (for a compilation of recent papers on paleogeography, see Meingold & Şengör 2019).…”

Boris Choubert: Unrecognized visionary geologist, pioneer of the global tectonics

“…It is not possible to attach this map to the present paper because it is protected by copyright. It has however been reproduced in a reduced size by Şengör (2014), by Letsch (2017) and more recently by Meinhold and Şengör (2018).…”

Quantifying the Link Between the Detrital Zircon Record and Tectonic Settings

“…Consequently, researchers have made major efforts to generate plate tectonic reconstruction models that describe the evolution and dynamics of plate tectonics on our planet. Initially these models focused on the motion of continents across the Earth's surface, revealing the sequence of continental assembly and dispersal events through Earth history (see review of Meinhold & Şengör, 2019). In recent years, a new generation of reconstructions (e.g., Domeier & Torsvik, 2014; Müller et al., 2019; Seton et al., 2012) has sought to go beyond the continental drift paradigm and estimate the existence and location of plates and plate boundaries, specifically subduction zones, mid‐ocean ridges, transform boundaries, and zones of diffuse deformation, which together describe the evolution of plate dynamics across Earth's surface.…”