A new reconstruction of Phanerozoic Earth evolution: Toward a big-data approach to global paleogeography

Abstract

Reliable reconstruction of global paleogeography through deep geologic time provides a key surface boundary condition for investigating many first-order Earth system and geodynamic processes such as climate change, geomagnetic field stability, regional geological and tectonic history, and biological evolution. Over the past decade, the development of the GPlates software led to a resurgence of community efforts in creating state-of-the-art plate tectonic models that integrate paleomagnetic, geological, and paleontological datasets, resulting in a plethora of reconstruction models. In this paper, we briefly review the strengths and weaknesses of existing global models, which depict alternative and sometimes contradictory tectonic scenarios. We then provide an overview of the general procedure in our construction of a revised Phanerozoic global paleogeographic model, including (1) evaluation of the paleomagnetic data that quantitatively dictate continental paleolatitudes and orientations, (2) selection of reference frames in which continents were positioned, and (3) calibration of continental longitudes in deep time. We update the apparent polar wander paths (APWPs) of the major continents using a recently developed weighted running mean approach, which rectifies two major issues with the conventional running mean approach regarding missing paleopoles in age windows and the enforced assumption of the Fisherian distribution. We re-evaluate the Phanerozoic continental reconstructions in a paleomagnetic framework using the updated APWPs, and calibrate continental paleolongitudes following the extended orthoversion hypothesis by placing the centroids of supercontinents Rodinia and Pangea 90° apart, with that of Rodinia at ∼90°E. We emphasize that the resulting global model is not intended to provide solutions to all global tectonic issues throughout the entire Phanerozoic Eon. Rather, we present our results as one viable model of Phanerozoic tectonic history which, like many existing interpretations, is built upon our understanding of the paleomagnetic, geological, and paleontological observations. Our goals are for this study to highlight the fundamental differences between reconstruction models and to serve as a starting point for future studies to fill key data gaps and test alternative hypotheses and tectonic scenarios.