For a quarter-century or more, the prevailing view among geoscientists—supported by paleomagnetic records in rock—has been that the portion of the ancient supercontinent of Pangea that is now the Colorado Plateau in southern Utah shifted more than 1,300 miles north during a 100-million-year span that ended about 200 million years ago in the early Jurassic Period, when Pangea began to break up.
But new research by a team of geoscientists from the University of Michigan and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln challenges that theory, based on extensive climate modeling studies and sedimentary records found from Wyoming into Utah and Arizona.
In a paper published in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal Science, U-M geophysicist Rob Van der Voo and co-authors report findings that indicate the area must have remained at the equator during the time in question.
"It's a puzzle, a 'conundrum' is the word we like to use," said Robert Oglesby of UNL. "And in the Science paper, we're not solving the conundrum, we're raising the conundrum."
HT: Creation Evolution Headlines
