. Collected reprints / Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories [and] Pacific Oceanographic Laboratories. Oceanography PANaNTARCTIC RIFT SYSTEM Figure 6âA summary of the drift motion of the continents. The New World has drifted west. Africa has moved north and counter- clockwise. India and Australia both have moved north. Eurasia has rotated clockwise so that Great Britain has moved from the tropics to a northern clime, while Japan has become more tropical. Antarctica has remained almost stationary. ing a trench, and the Atlantic would revert to being a closing ocea
. Collected reprints / Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories [and] Pacific Oceanographic Laboratories. Oceanography PANaNTARCTIC RIFT SYSTEM Figure 6âA summary of the drift motion of the continents. The New World has drifted west. Africa has moved north and counter- clockwise. India and Australia both have moved north. Eurasia has rotated clockwise so that Great Britain has moved from the tropics to a northern clime, while Japan has become more tropical. Antarctica has remained almost stationary. ing a trench, and the Atlantic would revert to being a closing ocean. Eventually, the continental rise prism would collide with this convergent juncture, and the con- tinental rise would collapse into a classical eugeoclinal foldbelt. The probable reality of this story line is enhanced by the fact that this sequence of events apparently has already transpired once before with the creation in the lower Paleozoic of the crystalline Appalachian eugeoclinal fold- belt. The Atlantic Ocean seems to have opened, closed, and reopened again (the last-named event commencing 190 million years ago), and in the future it may once more undergo closure. One of the grand themes of plate tectonics is that ocean basins are transient features, con- stantly changing their size and shape, while the continents not only persist, but also grow by the accretion to their margins of new eugeoclinal foldbelts. Paired with the ancient, folded eugeoclines are miogeo- clines (or miogeosynclines) of which the loosely folded Appalachians, lying parallel and inside of the crystalline Appalachians, is the type example for North America. The thick wedge of Cretaceous and Cenozoic sediments under- lying the coastal plain and capping the Atlantic shelf pro- vides an actualistic example paired to the modern con- tinental rise. Plate tectonics also provides an explanation for the extensive downwarping needed for the deposition of this wedge entirely laid down in shallow water. With
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