Pangea, as it existed in late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic time, consisted of a northern group of continents (Laurasia, comprised of North America, Greenland, Europe and Asia) and the southern Gondwana assembly, which includes South America, Africa, Australia, Madagascar, India, and Antarctica. It is generally assumed that in Pangea, Gondwana's Northwest-African margin was adjacent to North America's Appalachian margin; this reconstruction is called Pangea-A. However, for times before the Late Triassic the available data from paleomagnetism derived from Gondwana and Laurasia do not agree well with the Pangea-A fit, which have led scientists to either question the validity of these data or to propose a different fit, called Pangea-B. The main problem with the Pangea-B reconstruction is that everyone agrees that by Late Triassic time, the fit was that of Pangea-A, which implies that Pangea-B transformed into Pangea-A in Permian or Triassic time. The relative movements to accomplish this change consist of a surprisingly large 3500-km or greater dextral mega-shear between Gondwana and Laurasia. For such a mega-shear, little geological evidence exists, and geologists have therefore ignored the Pangea-B proposal. Relevant Late Permian and Early Triassic paleomagnetic data have thus far remained of demonstrably inferior quality, and we intend, therefore, to collect new paleomagnetic data for this time interval to test Pangea fits, and to determine whether a change from Pangea-B to Pangea-A occurred before or after the Late Permian, if it did occur at all. The majority of the new collections will be from Argentina, where stratified volcanic rocks exist that will likely yield reliable results.
The supercontinent Pangea is a very fundamental and prominent aspect of the ancient geography of the Earth, and the accuracy of its configuration is of interest to anyone studying Earth Science. The aim of this study is to determine whether there is any evidence for a Pangea reconstruction in Late Permian-Early Triassic paleomagnetic data, in which northwestern South America was located adjacent to the Appalachian margin of North America. Such a Pangea-B reconstruction is rather different from the classically and widely accepted Pangea-A fit in which northwestern South America is, instead, adjacent to the Texas margin of North America. The available paleomagnetic records for Permian and Early Triassic time surprisingly seem to favor Pangea-B, which has puzzled geologists for decades. If Pangea B existed, then it must have undergone a large wrenching movement during either the Permian or the Triassic. This study intends to establish whether the previous, rather preliminary results that favor Pangea-B are supported by carefully determined new paleomagnetic data. If Pangea-B is found to have existed, the study will by inference have obtained evidence for enormous lateral fault movements, of the order of 3500 km in length or more, the likes of which are not documented for any time in the post-Pangea history of the Earth, that is, in the last 200 million years.
