SINCE THE l6TH CENTURY, CARTOGRAPHERS HAVE NOTICED THE jigsaw-puzzle fit of the continental edges. Since the 19th century, geologists have known that some fossil plants and animals are extraordinarily similar across the globe, and some sequences of rock formations in distant continents are also strikingly alike. At the turn of the 20th century, Austrian geologist Eduard Suess proposed the theor...

The Earth is likely to have acquired most of its water during accretion. Internal heat of planetesimals by short-lived radioisotopes would have caused some water loss, but impacts into planetesimals were insufficiently energetic to produce further drying. Water is thought to be critical for the development of plate tectonics, because it lowers viscosities in the asthenosphere, enabling subducti...

The gravitational pull of subducted slabs is thought to drive the motions of Earth's tectonic plates, but the coupling between slabs and plates is not well established. If a slab is mechanically attached to a subducting plate, it can exert a direct pull on the plate. Alternatively, a detached slab may drive a plate by exciting flow in the mantle that exerts a shear traction on the base of the p...

Tectonic setting exerts fi rst-order control on basin formation as refl ected in basin subsidence history. While our approach ignores the effects of fl exural loading and eustatic sea-level change, consistency of backstripped subsidence histories (i.e., with local loading effects of sediment removed) suggests consistent tectonic driving mechanisms in each tectonic setting, with the possible exc...

The Cretaceous breakup of Gondwana strongly modified the global distribution of shallow tropical seas reshaping the geographic configuration of marine basins. However, the links between tropical reef availability, plate tectonic processes and marine biodiversity distribution patterns are still unknown. Here, we show that a spatial diversification model constrained by absolute plate motions for ...

A conceptual shift is overdue in geodynamics. Popular models that present plate tectonics as being driven by bottom-heated whole-mantle convection, with or without plumes, are based on obsolete assumptions, are contradicted by much evidence, and fail to account for observed plate interactions. Subduction-hinge rollback is the key to viable mechanisms. The Pacifi c spreads rapidly yet shrinks by...

Deciphering relationships among the orders of placental mammals remains an important problem in evolutionary biology and has implications for understanding patterns of morphological character evolution, reconstructing the ancestral placental genome, and evaluating the role of plate tectonics and dispersal in the biogeographic history of this group. Until recently, both molecular and morphologic...

Textbooks frequently extol plate tectonics theory without questioning what might be wrong with the theory or without discussing a competitive theory. How can students be taught to challenge popular ideas when they are only presented a one-sided view? In a just a few pages, I describe more than a century of geodynamic ideas. I review what is wrong with plate tectonics theory and with Earth expan...