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The Paleomap Project
| Article
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16326 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
3,157 Words |
| Author
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Louise Purrett Carroll
Louise Purrett Carroll is a science writer based in Colorado
and Washington State. |
If you live in Florida, you are sitting on a piece of earth that was once down by the equator. If you live near Dakar, Senegal, your chunk of earth was once next to what is now Florida, and about 700 miles due north of what is now Venezuela. In some places the bedrock you are standing on may have traveled more than you have.
It is all a matter of continental drift. Once dismissed as preposterous by the geologic community, the theory of continental drift now approaches dogma. Continental drift is an aspect of the broader "plate tectonic" model of the earth in which cool, rigid plates of continental and oceanic crust move around atop the hot, less rigid internal layers of the planet. Plate tectonics theory provides a framework for reconstructing the history of the earth's crust, and of the rocks, plants, and animals residing on its restless surface. Building on this framework, teams of researchers in the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India, and other countries are synthesizing masses of raw data, seeking patterns that allow them to produce maps, or reconstructions, of how the crustal plates were arranged in the past.
"For the past 20 years," sums up geologist Christopher Scotese of Shell Oil, Houston, "the scientists studying continental drift and plate tectonics have been in an intense data-gathering phase. Ships have gone out, satellites have gone up" to collect rock samples, sediment cores, and magnetic data. "Now we're in an intense synthesis phase to produce a graphic description of what has happened."
Scotese is engaged in an effort to, in effect, "synthesize the synthesizers," by organizing the scattered teams attempting plate tectonic reconstructions into an international "super team": the PALEOMAP project. Each individual team has been highly successful in producing maps for specific regions or periods of time. But the task of mapping the evolution of the entire globe is simply too big for any one group. It must, Scotese believes, be an international effort.
The PALEOMAP project is being conducted under the auspices of the International Council of Scientific Unions, an umbrella organization for global cooperation of hundreds of different scientific associations. Scotese is chairman of an international committee coordinating the PALEOMAP project. The twofold goal of this project is to produce both a global digital data base of geologic information relevant to plate tectonics and an atlas illustrating, in unprecedented detail, the movements of the continents and the formation of ocean basins over the past 600
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