Earth History and Palaeogeography

This book provides a complete Phanerozoic story of palaeogeography, using new and detailed full-colour maps, to link surface and deep-Earth processes.

Trond H. Torsvik (Author), L. Robin M. Cocks (Author)

9781107105324, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 December 2016

332 pages, 32 colour illus. 136 maps
28.3 x 22.5 x 2 cm, 1.19 kg

'This incredibly ambitious publication covers more than a half billion years of tectonic movements and paleobiogeographic patterns … the events and patterns discussed do not occur in temporal or spatial isolation. Torsvik and Cocks did an admirable job of acknowledging these boundaries while writing the text in a format that is not confined by those limits. The authors have taken great care to provide extensive maps, including numbering and listing tectonic units in helpful ways … [The book] will provide the broad perspective that is foundational for other types of questions in biogeography. In addition to the unique strength of this volume in synthesizing immense amounts of data, the authors have much more information freely available online. The programs and data at their website open new innovative ways for teaching, the ability to explore research ideas, and a fun way to look at more maps.' Dennis R. Ruez, Jr, The Quarterly Review of Biology

Using full-colour palaeogeographical maps from the Cambrian to the present, this interdisciplinary volume explains how plate motions and surface volcanism are linked to processes in the Earth's mantle, and to climate change and the evolution of the Earth's biota. These new and very detailed maps provide a complete and integrated Phanerozoic story of palaeogeography. They illustrate the development of all the major mountain-building orogenies. Old lands, seas, ice caps, volcanic regions, reefs, and coal beds are highlighted on the maps, as well as faunal and floral provinces. Many other original diagrams show sections from the Earth's core, through the mantle, and up to the lithosphere, and how Large Igneous Provinces are generated, helping to understand how plates have appeared, moved, and vanished through time. Supplementary resources are available online, making this an invaluable reference for researchers, graduate students, professional geoscientists and anyone interested in the geological history of the Earth.

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Methods for locating old continents and terranes
3. Tectonic units of the Earth
4. Earth's origins and the Precambrian
5. Cambrian
6. Ordovician
7. Silurian
8. Devonian
9. Carboniferous
10. Permian
11. Triassic
12. Jurassic
13. Cretaceous
14. Paleogene
15. Neogene and Quaternary
16. Climates past and present
Endnote
Appendix 1. Location of Phanerozoic Large Igneous Provinces
Appendix 2. Mesozoic to modern Panthalassic and Pacific Ocean plates
Appendix 3. Orogenies
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Palaeontology [RBX], Stratigraphy [RBGH], Soil science, sedimentology [RBGB], Geology & the lithosphere [RBG], Earth sciences [RB]