Project

Geoscience and Environment

Project

Scope of the Project

This project compares Argand's map of Gondwanaland presented at the International Geological Congress in 1922 and maps prepared by Hurley, and by Bullard and others in the 1960's.

Studies of the Alps

Emile Argand was a student of Maurice Lugeon (1870-1953). Lugeon had "...demonstrated that the north front of the Alpine chain is composed of large superimposed nappes (folded sheets of rock thrust over the rocks beneath). His theory that the mountains near the Simplon Pass on the Swiss-Italian border were large recumbent folds pushed toward the north was confirmed after the completion of the Simplon Tunnel (1905) allowed a geologic profile of the region to be taken", (Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM, 2004).

Argand continued the work of Lugeon and in 1911 his charts on the recumbent folds of the Alps pennines and the Western Alps clearly described for the first time the structure of a mountain chain in central Switzerland (Click image on the right for an example of his work). He was appointed professor of geology in Neuchâtel (1911).

Study of the Himalayas

Argand expanded his studies of mountains to Asia and in 1924 published La tectonique de l'Asie which includes the evolution of the Earth as a whole. Comments by Donald McIntyre about Wegmann, one of Armand's former students, and Lugeon, Armand's teacher: see Professor Wegmann, middle of the webpage.

Global Tectonics

In his book Tectonics of Asia, Armand extended his studies to global tectonics. He presented a map of the supercontinent Gondwanaland. The caption uses the term block. By the 1950's the term plate had replaced the term block to describe a large expanse of rock that moved as one mass. In the 1950's plate tectonics described only vertical and horizontal movement along fault lines, sometimes amounting to tens of kilometers. A minority of earth scientists, the mobilists or drifters, accepted movement of continents by hundreds or thousands of kilometers. The difference between mobilists and drifters is beyond the scope of this study.

Comparison with Du Toit

The South African geologist, Du Toit, also presented a map of Gondwanaland based on geological evidence: rock types, formations, and faultlines (Dott and Prothero, 1994). Du Toit claimed that the geological evidence is more reliable than the paleontological evidence because it cannot be discounted using the hypothesis of lost continents. The map illustrates the argument that there are no lost pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, no continents that sank into the sea.

Comparison with Bullard and Others

Sir Edward Bullard, J. E. Everett, and A. C. Smith of the University of Cambridge used a computer to match up the coastlines of the continents setting the continental shelf at a depth of 900 meters. This map is similar to the Argand's map of the supercontinent Gondwanaland.

Comparison with Hurley

In 1968, Patrick Hurley at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology matched geological provinces of the same age to show how South America and Africa presumably fitted together some 200 million years ago. This map is similar to the map of Gondwanaland presented by Armand in his book Tectonics of Asia based on an approach similar to that of Du Toit.

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