Origins of the Geosynclinal Borderland theory

Abstract

Charles Schuchert developed the geosynclinal concept ofHall andDana into a paleogeographic model of North America which included “borderlands” on the oceanic side of each geosyncline. These lands were the source of thick clastic sediments which accumulated in the geosynclines. As early as 1841 H. D.Rogers inferred a southeastern source for clastic sediments in the Appalachian Mountains.Hall (1859) proposed that folded mountains form only where sediments have accumulated to great thickness in narrow bands along the margin of continents. Dana named such belts “geosynclinals”. He advocated a theory of continental growth by accretion of rocks around a primitive nucleus. In 1890 he recognized Archaean protaxes east of the Appalachians, west of the Rocky Mountains, and probably in the Cascade-Sierra Nevada range. C. D. Walcott showed Dana's Archaean highlands on maps which related the thickness of Cambrian deposits to times of submergence. H. S.Williams named the eastern land Appalachia in 1897. Details for other periods were mapped by B. Willis and by A. W. Grabau in 1909, neither of whom showed any western borderland. A series of maps for short time intervals bySchuchert (1910) show numerous positive areas including a large Cascadia west of the Cordilleran trough. Faunal relationships implied that the Appalachain geosyncline was largely isolated from the Atlantic Ocean during the Paleozoic. In 1923Schuchert insisted that geosynclines were part of the continent, not ocean margins nor mediterraneans, and that the sediments implied borderlands that had repeatedly been elevated and eroded.