A pioneer of Precambrian geology: Boris Choubert’s fit of the continents across the Atlantic (1935) and his insights into the Proterozoic tectonic structure of the West African Craton and adjacent areas
Abstract:Plate tectonics revolutionized the Earth Sciences during the 1960s and led to a fundamentally new view of tectonic processes inside mountain belts. Application of the new theory to pre-Permian and especially Precambrian orogenic belts developed somewhat reluctantly during the 1970s and 1980s. The present article presents and discusses the ideas of Boris Choubert (1906-1983), a French colonial geologist of Russian origin, which he first developed in 1935. He tried to test Wegener's theory of continental displac… Show more
“…Boris Choubert's vision of the orogenies of the whole Palaeozoic Era is summarized in Fig. 4, which is the first plate reconstruction for the Palaeozoic (Letsch, 2017). It is very similar to current models and, despite the progress made over the last 80 years, bears witness to the remarkable insight of its author.…”
mentioning
confidence: 76%
“…4 (redrawn from Choubert's Fig. 3), which is "probably the first plate reconstruction for the Palaeozoic" (Letsch, 2017). Nevertheless, this series of maps only shows very small plate movements, outlined with arrows and thin grey continental contours, in spite of Choubert describing various continental movements in the accompanying text, sometimes in great detail.…”
Section: Cambrian Ordovician and Gothlandian: The Caledonian Beltmentioning
confidence: 88%
“…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).…”
Section: The Atlantic Thresholdmentioning
confidence: 98%
“…At that time, scientific publications did not circulate as easily as they do today! As already mentioned above, two papers were recently published simultaneously and independently (Letsch, 2017;Kornprobst, 2017). Their purpose was to highlight Boris Choubert's work on Precambrian and Palaeozoic mountain belts and continental drift.…”
This work is a review of Boris Choubert’s paper (1935), which was published in French under the rather devalorizing title: “Research on the Genesis of Palaeozoic and Precambrian Belts.” Despite its innovative content, this article had no impact either at the time of its publication or even later. It begins with the construction of a remarkable fit of the circum-Atlantic continents. This was based on the −1.000 meters isobath instead of the shoreline. Thirty years before Bullard et al. (1965), it demonstrated in an indisputable way the reality of the continents motion on the surface of the Earth. Therefore, Choubert designated Wegener’s “continental drift” as the main cause of tectonics. Even going beyond Wegener’s theory, he argued that this mechanism was efficient well before the formation of the Triassic Pangæa, during the whole Palaeozoic to result in the building of the Caledonian and Hercynian mountains. Although he was still encumbered by the vocabulary of the time regarding geosynclines, Boris Choubert described tectonics based on the horizontal mobility of the Precambrian continental blocks. Oddly enough, he did not apply this model to the Precambrian structures, which he attributed to the effects of the Earth’s rotation on the continental crust during its solidification. At the time of its publication, this paper was a very important step towards understanding global tectonics. Unfortunately, Choubert’s contemporaries did not generally recognize its significance.
“…Boris Choubert's vision of the orogenies of the whole Palaeozoic Era is summarized in Fig. 4, which is the first plate reconstruction for the Palaeozoic (Letsch, 2017). It is very similar to current models and, despite the progress made over the last 80 years, bears witness to the remarkable insight of its author.…”
mentioning
confidence: 76%
“…4 (redrawn from Choubert's Fig. 3), which is "probably the first plate reconstruction for the Palaeozoic" (Letsch, 2017). Nevertheless, this series of maps only shows very small plate movements, outlined with arrows and thin grey continental contours, in spite of Choubert describing various continental movements in the accompanying text, sometimes in great detail.…”
Section: Cambrian Ordovician and Gothlandian: The Caledonian Beltmentioning
confidence: 88%
“…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).…”
Section: The Atlantic Thresholdmentioning
confidence: 98%
“…At that time, scientific publications did not circulate as easily as they do today! As already mentioned above, two papers were recently published simultaneously and independently (Letsch, 2017;Kornprobst, 2017). Their purpose was to highlight Boris Choubert's work on Precambrian and Palaeozoic mountain belts and continental drift.…”
This work is a review of Boris Choubert’s paper (1935), which was published in French under the rather devalorizing title: “Research on the Genesis of Palaeozoic and Precambrian Belts.” Despite its innovative content, this article had no impact either at the time of its publication or even later. It begins with the construction of a remarkable fit of the circum-Atlantic continents. This was based on the −1.000 meters isobath instead of the shoreline. Thirty years before Bullard et al. (1965), it demonstrated in an indisputable way the reality of the continents motion on the surface of the Earth. Therefore, Choubert designated Wegener’s “continental drift” as the main cause of tectonics. Even going beyond Wegener’s theory, he argued that this mechanism was efficient well before the formation of the Triassic Pangæa, during the whole Palaeozoic to result in the building of the Caledonian and Hercynian mountains. Although he was still encumbered by the vocabulary of the time regarding geosynclines, Boris Choubert described tectonics based on the horizontal mobility of the Precambrian continental blocks. Oddly enough, he did not apply this model to the Precambrian structures, which he attributed to the effects of the Earth’s rotation on the continental crust during its solidification. At the time of its publication, this paper was a very important step towards understanding global tectonics. Unfortunately, Choubert’s contemporaries did not generally recognize its significance.
“…Furthermore, the title of Choubert's paper ('Research on the genesis of Paleozoic and Precambrian belts') did not reveal its full scientific content, and thus probably contributed to its lack of wider acknowledgement (Kornprobst 2017). Thankfully, in recent years this early work of Choubert has started to receive the recognition it deserves (Kornprobst 2017;Letsch 2017). Other notable contributions that pre-date the Plate Tectonic paradigm of the 1960s include Alexander Du Toit (1937) and Arthur Holmes (1931Holmes ( , 1944.…”
It is now more than 50 years since Tuzo Wilson published his paper asking 'Did the Atlantic close and then re-open?'. This led to the 'Wilson Cycle' concept in which the repeated opening and closing of ocean basins along old orogenic belts is a key process in the assembly and breakup of supercontinents. This implied that the processes of rifting and mountain building somehow pre-conditioned and weakened the lithosphere in these regions, making them susceptible to strain localization during future deformation episodes. Here we provide a retrospective look at the development of the concept, how it has evolved over the past five decades, current thinking and future focus areas. The Wilson Cycle has proved enormously important to the theory and practice of geology and underlies much of what we know about the geological evolution of the Earth and its lithosphere. The concept will no doubt continue to be developed as we gain more understanding of the physical processes that control mantle convection and plate tectonics, and as more data become available from currently less accessible regions.
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