Geologic History of North America Gets Overturned

Yahoo News ^ | 4-3-2013 | Becky Oskin

[Renfield]

t's time to redraw the map of the world during the reign of the dinosaurs, two scientists say.

Picture the U.S. West Coast as a tortured tectonic boundary, similar to Australia and Southeast Asia today. Erase the giant subduction zone researchers have long nestled against western North America. Drop a vast archipelago into the ancient Panthalassa Ocean, usually drawn as an empty void, the kind on which medieval mapmakers would have depicted fantastical beasts.

"Now it fits together," said Karin Sigloch, a seismologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, and lead study author. "We've come up with a pretty different solution that I think will hold up."

With a spectacularly clear look at the remnants of ancient subduction zones under North America, Sigloch and her colleague Mitch Mihalynuk have revised 200 million years of geologic history. The results of their study are published today (April 3) in the journal Nature....

[stormer]

Sorry, but a 45 year old paper that can't even reference contemporary terminology is a poor substitute for modern research. If you really want (and if I thought it would do any good at all), I could supply you with some more up to date papers.

[ReagansShinyHair]

Just marking for later.

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[mj81]

That reply is so flawed that it’s not even worth addressing.

Strategerist - why don’t you help out stormer?

[stormer]

There are so many problems with this, I don't even know where to start - the author doesn't even have the decency to put his name on it! Not withstanding the grammatical errors, completely unsupported contentions, lack of any acknowledgment of well understood geological processes, the author can't even correctly identify the directional aspect of the Hawaiian Island chain. As far a “visual analysis” is concerned, that doesn't mean looking at Google Earth and guessing about stuff, it means applying known mechanisms to the problem at hand and developing comparable data to support a hypothesis. I really laughed when the author said he'd submitted his “findings” with Nature and the GSA - I wonder if he mentioned his view that a comet caused a global flood? Anyway, it's just crap.

[mj81]

You were supposed to critique the paper cited at he link. Such bluster.

[aimhigh]

I think the expanding planet theory is too hilariously stupid

If the earth is expanding, it's due to the slow build up of space dust and meteors continually hitting the earth.