14 | Halliburton Landmark
New
Frontiers
in Plate
Boundaries
by: Jean-Christophe
Wrobel-Daveau,
Bruce Eglington and
Graeme Nicoll
Crustal dynamics showing earthquakes, plate boundaries, and volcanoes. Image from https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/155 with credit to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Ce
Research Project (GCRP), National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), United States Geological Survey, National Science Foundation (NSF), Defen
(DMA), New York Film and Animation Company, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), Hughes STX Corporation.
Given a plate tectonic model is meant to be a
singular representation of what the Earth looked
like back through geological time, one might
ask, why are so many different models available,
and which one should I use? In order to answer
these questions, it is useful to understand the
genealogy of the different plate tectonic models,
what data underpin them, what methods and
techniques are used to construct and update
them, and what uncertainties are involved.
We will go on to consider how the scope and
complexity of these models went hand-in-hand
with growing computational power over the last
60 years. In order to compare and contrast the
variety of plate tectonic models that exist today,
we need to set out the main difference between
plate tectonics and continental drift models,
and consider the importance of plate tectonic
boundaries.
This story builds on discussions in previous
editions of the Exploration Insights magazine.
Recent articles discussed the evolution of the
theory of plate tectonics and its importance to all
geological concepts (Wrobel-Daveau and Nicoll,
2019), and how in the modern age, plate tectonic
models are an important tool for use in natural
resource exploration workflows (Lang et al.,
2020).
PLATE TECTONIC MODEL
GENEALOGY
The first attempts at reconstructing the paleoposition
of continental land masses were
hand-drawn as far back as the 17 th century
by Dutch map makers, and later in the 20 th
century by Alfred Wegner and Boris Choubert
(Kornprobst et al., 2018). However, these were
really just singular snapshots of often poorly
constrained geological times, and are more akin
to paleogeographic maps (Figure 1). Indeed,
they lacked the understanding of geodynamic
processes, such as the absolute and relative
motion of plates on a sphere, the driving
mechanisms behind plate motion, and the
existence of plate limits.