Continental Drift, III: Late Paleozoic Glacial Centers, and Devonian-Eocene Coal Distribution

Abstract

Glaciation and large-scale coal deposition cannot take place without an adequate water supply. If the supercontinents of Gondwanaland and Laurasia ever existed, Proterozoic and Paleozoic glaciations would not have been possible deep in the supercontinents' interiors, nor could the major Carboniferous, Permian, and younger coal fields of eastern North and South America, and of eastern Africa and India have formed. The presence of major late Paleozoic ice centers in Western Australia, central India and northern West Pakistan, Africa, Brazil, and the Atlantic-Indian Ocean margins of Antarctica, and of large Paleozoic coal fields in eastern Africa, eastern India, Brazil, and eastern North America indicates that large water supplies actually were present close to the places where the glaciations took place, and where the coal fields formed. This in turn suggests that currently popular reconstructions of Gondwanaland and Laurasia are wrong. Coal accumulations took place in areas where plant decay was slight, average annual temperature ranged from cool to warm, and annual rainfall exceeded 1,500-2,000 mm. The great amount of rain required could not have been precipitated unless late Paleozoic Atlantic and Indian Oceans had existed. The possibility that these late Paleozoic oceans were inland seas is eliminated by the circulation requirements of these oceans. For example, the surface waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans are derived ultimately from the Southern Ocean. This surface water is returned to the Southern Ocean by intermediate-to abyssal-depth currents. This mechanism for returning water to the Southern Ocean appears to eliminate any possibility that the late Paleozoic inland seas were epeirogenic water bodies. Therefore, until advocates of the new global tectonics find an alternate explanation for tillite and coal distribution, the spreading sea-floor, mobile-plate, and polar-wandering hypotheses will have to be regarded as interesting speculations which are supported by only a fraction of the known geological, paleontological, and paleoclimatological data.