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Evidence of Northwest Movement of Land in Western
North America
My theory supposes that western North America
was composed of the western upland edge of the Pacific plate and the northward
moving Siberian tail. At the time of making this supposition, I knew of no
on-the-ground evidence that would either support or refute this supposition.
Let's remember that the entire North American continent is currently
moving slightly to the south as it also moves west. I have been making the
assumption of northward movement of the Siberian tail in the face of the fact
that the continent as a whole has been moving to the south.
During
2015, there were three separate articles that show evidence of significant
northward movement of the area that I refer to as the Siberian tail during the
past 100 million years.
First, there is a paper entitled "Dismemberment
and northward migration of the Cordilleran orogen: Baja - BC resolved" by
Robert S. Hildebrand of the Dept. of Earth & Planetary Sciences a UC,
Davis.
Hildebrand notes that paleomagnetic evidence implies "that a
major portion of the coastal cordillera of British Columbia migrated northward
>1000 km between 90 and 60 Ma."
Hildebrand continues, "In this
contribution, I show that meridional migration within the Cordillera was not
confined to narrow slivers along the coast, but instead involved the entire
width of the Cordillera, from the Laramie fold-thrust belt westward
…"Hildebrand further states that "The overlapping nature of the geology
along both the Lewis & Clark transverse zone and the Texas Lineament, their
similar orientations, and the observation that both appear to be truncated at
the Laramie fold-thrust belt, suggest that the two zones were once continuous
and separated during the Laramie event on one or more faults in, or adjacent
to, the thrust belt. Currently the two zones are ~1300 km apart."
In
other words, from my theory's point of view, somewhere during the past 100
million years, a big hunk of the Siberian tail moved 1300 km northward, while
the remainder of the tail end was frozen in place and resides in Mexico, having
been cut off by the Laramie orogeny.
Another paper by Mikhail Kaban et.
al., entitled "Cratonic root beneath North America shifted by basal drag from
the convecting mantle," says "That the craton below the North American
continent is extremely deformed: its root is shifted relative to the center of
the craton by 850 kilometers towards the west-southwest."
This
deformation may be a different aspect of the same phenomenon that Hildebrand
writes about.
A third paper makes an interesting passing reference to
this same subject. Writing about dinosaurs in Washington State, Brandon R.
Peecock and Christina A. Sidor note that dinosaurs were not found much in
Washington State because much of the land was under water. They say, "Eighty
million years ago, the rocks that form Sucia Island were likely deposited
farther south. How much farther south is a topic of scientific debate, with
locations ranging between present-day Baja California, Mexico, and Northern
California."
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