Pangea Stuck at Square One

Students in their physical science classes learn all about Pangea, the supercontinent that broke up 200 million years ago and ended up with today’s familiar continents after millions of years of continental drift.  What they don’t often learn is how scientists come up with these ideas, and how they pull their hair out when observations don’t match the story.  Here are some quotes from 2 articles on PhysOrg, #1 and #2, that reveal interesting things going on in the back rooms of the wizards.

• [Title] Dunes, climate models don’t match up with paleomagnetic records.
• “It’s a puzzle, a ‘conundrum’ is the word we like to use,” said Robert Oglesby of UNL [Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln].  “And in the Science paper, we’re not solving the conundrum, we’re raising the conundrum.”
• “I thought that was very curious,” [David] Loope said.  “It didn’t seem to fit with what we think we know about where the continents were.”
• The three geoscientists began working together, trying to find a computerized climate model that would explain the discrepancy, but they couldn’t find one that worked.  “We ran the model in any different number of configurations just to see if we could make it do something different,” [Clinton] Rowe said…. The equator is the only place you could get this large-scale arc of winds that turn from the northeast to the northwest as they moved south.  Nowhere else would you get that as part of the general circulation unless the physics of the world 200 million years ago was very different from what it is today.  And we just don’t think that’s the case.”
• “We brought Rob [Van der Voo] in to try to see if he could help us sort it out, and he’s like, ‘Gosh, guys, I don’t know.  This is a conundrum,’” Oglesby said.  “It’s important to note that we have not just a paleomag person as a co-author, but arguably the best-known paleomag person in the world—and he’s as confused as we are.”
• “The nicest thing would have been if we had a solution, but we don’t,” said Van der Voo, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Geological Sciences at U-M.  “All we can say is that we have this enigma, so perhaps our model of Pangea for the period in question is wrong or the wind direction didn’t follow the common patterns that we recognize in the modern world.  Neither seems likely….”
• ““We’ll come up with everything we can possibly think of,” Oglesby said.  “From the point of view of the climate model, the paleogeography, the vegetation, the topography, local-scale vs. large-scale, paleomag, going back and rethinking everything that the dunes tell us.  We’ll go back to square one in everything, trying to figure it out.”

The team expected patterns in alleged sand dune formations to match up with paleomagnetic data, but there was a clear mismatch.  Their paper was published in Science.¹

1.  Clinton M. Rowe, David B. Loope, Robert J. Oglesby, Rob Van der Voo, Charles E. Broadwater, “Inconsistencies Between Pangean Reconstructions and Basic Climate Controls,” Science, 3 November 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5854, pp. 1284-1286, DOI: 10.1126/science.1146639.

It is nice when scientists stop bluffing to the press, and admit they have a problem.  But are they really going back to square one?  Sometimes the most obvious problem is staring them right in the face and they don’t even see it: the assumption of millions of years.

The team believes that a supercontinent just sat there at one location for 100 million years collecting sand dunes, from the Permian to the Jurassic, then all of a sudden it started moving north.  Is that even remotely plausible?  Take away the habit of assuming billions of years are available, and question the traditional interpretations of the data, and the idea would seem ridiculous on the face of it.

Evolutionary biologists and geologists toss around their millions of years thoughtlessly, making “reckless drafts on the bank of time” (07/02/2007) whenever they need to shield their models from lack of empirical evidence.  Without an overhaul of their presuppositions about the world, it is impossible for them to get back to square one.  Square one is outside their box.