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Plate tectonics

Lost sea floor

Nature Geoscience volume 5, pages 165–167 (2012)Cite this article

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The configurations of ancient tectonic plates are difficult to reconstruct. Seismic images of deep subducted plates, combined with data from ancient volcanic arcs, help to derive a tectonic map of the Pacific Ocean as it was 200 million years ago.

The system of plate tectonics on Earth has probably existed for billions of years. As the tectonic plates move, new sea floor is formed at mid-ocean ridges and the old oceanic plates are recycled back into the mantle through subduction. Because subduction eventually destroys most of the sea floor, our knowledge of plate configurations declines back in time; the distribution of oceanic plates before the Cretaceous period, about 140 million years ago, is largely unknown. Writing in Nature Geoscience, van der Meer et al.1 report a reconstruction of the global plate tectonic environment during the Triassic to Jurassic periods, and demonstrate the existence of ancient subduction zones within the palaeo-Pacific ocean.

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Figure 1: Schematic reconstructions of Pacific-style oceanic plates.

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  1. Lijun Liu is at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0225, USA,

    Lijun Liu

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  1. Lijun Liu
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Correspondence to Lijun Liu.

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Liu, L. Lost sea floor. Nature Geosci 5, 165–167 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1410

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