Simplest plate reconstruction ever
This month's GSA Today includes this image:
It's part of a figure in the featured article by Thomas Servais and colleagues, examining the diversification of life during the Ordovician period of geologic time. I think that this must be the simplest rendering of plate reconstruction I've ever seen (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). While there are certainly many salient details left off of such a rendering, it serves the purposes of the article well, correlating a rise in biodiversity with high sea levels and supercontinent breakup. (If supercontinent breakup produces high rates of sea-floor spreading, the large volume of the mid-ocean ridge will displace lots of seawater and cause eustatic sea level rise.)
Here's the image in the context of the diagram in which it appears:
Reference:
Thomas Servais, David A.T. Harper, Axel Munnecke, Alan W. Owen, and Peter M. Sheehan. "Understanding the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE): Influences of paleogeography, paleoclimate, or paleoecology," GSA Today, April/May 2009, pp. 4-10.
It's part of a figure in the featured article by Thomas Servais and colleagues, examining the diversification of life during the Ordovician period of geologic time. I think that this must be the simplest rendering of plate reconstruction I've ever seen (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). While there are certainly many salient details left off of such a rendering, it serves the purposes of the article well, correlating a rise in biodiversity with high sea levels and supercontinent breakup. (If supercontinent breakup produces high rates of sea-floor spreading, the large volume of the mid-ocean ridge will displace lots of seawater and cause eustatic sea level rise.)
Here's the image in the context of the diagram in which it appears:
Reference:
Thomas Servais, David A.T. Harper, Axel Munnecke, Alan W. Owen, and Peter M. Sheehan. "Understanding the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE): Influences of paleogeography, paleoclimate, or paleoecology," GSA Today, April/May 2009, pp. 4-10.
Labels: art, ordovician, plate tectonics
3 Comments:
For years, I've been telling my historical geology classes about the likely effects of the number of isolated continents and sea level fluctuations on available living space.
Major impacts happen all the time; it's likely that to get a really BIG extinction you need a major impact (or some other catastrophic event) to occur when tectonics/sea level have already depressed diversity.
Nice to see this article, which tends to support that idea.
Is this over-simiplifed, or is it elegantly simple, given the context?
I think it works.
I think it's pretty neat, even if simplified.
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