Continental Drift and Tectonics links

Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics (Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay) --and see his History of Global Plate Motions

Plate Tectonics animation

Paleomap Project (Christopher Scotese at U Texas Arlington)

from Science:
The continents are something like leaves floating in a superslow-motion Jacuzzi. Every few hundred million years, the land masses clump together; then pressures build, and they break up and spread out across the globe. Experts have built up this scenario over decades of excruciatingly precise measurements of magnetic patterns in the sea floor that trace the lumbering movements of continents, as well as from other geologic clues.

As an undergraduate in the 1970s, University of Texas, Arlington, paleogeographer Chris Scotese contrived a neat way to illustrate plate tectonics: He made flip books. Bend the book and riffle through the pages quickly, and you'd see a crude animation of, say, the ancient supercontinent Pangea breaking up. Now Scotese has brought his flip books into cyberspace at his Paleomap Project site (www.scotese.com). Click on an animation of the world, and you can zip back and forth in time between Pangea 200 million years ago (Mya), the Cretaceous 70 Mya, and today; or time travel to the next continental convocation. You can also zoom in for close-ups, such as India peeling off from Madagascar and making a beeline for Asia.

The site (which sells CDs and maps) also offers detailed maps that show ancient mountain ranges and climates.

GEOPHYSICS: Enhanced: A Strained Earth, Past and Present (John G. Ramsay) (Science Volume 288, Number 5474, Issue of 23 Jun 2000, pp. 2139-2141.)

Pleistocene Overview

The Pleistocene (1.8 million to 11,000 years ago) from UC Berkeley (see their links to other sites)

"Dance of the Seasons" from PRINCIPLES OF GLOBAL DYNAMICS ( An Introduction to Geodynamics from UNC --requires Windows Media Player or other .mpg player, or QuickTime)

Effects of Past Global Change on Life (1995) (text of a National Academy Press book)

Some bits from a search for 'pleistocene' in Science:

J. A. Klinka and R. M. Zink (Reports, 12 Sept. 1997, p. 1666) found that "molecular data suggest a relatively protracted history of speciation events among North American songbirds over the past 5 million years," contrary to that suggested by the "Late Pleistocene Origins (LPO) model."

B. S. Arbogast and J. B. Slowinski comment that the report contains invalid assumptions about estimating "dates of divergence," no measures of error, and no test of whether "a molecular clock holds for their data"--which Arbogast and Slowinski find it does not.

In response, Klicka and Zink discuss the assumptions made in the report (finding that a molecular clock "is valid for this data set"), provide details of their analyses, and maintain that the LPO model of speciation has been falsified.The full text of these comments can be seen at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/282/5396/1955a
(from here)

(I followed the link to "Similar Articles in ISI Web of Science" and downloaded the 100-odd resulting records, probably worth looking through to get an idea of how effective ISI's algorithm is)

On the tectonics account, try this:

Want to see the fault lines around the Andes, fast? This site in Germany will make a map of any part of the world in various projection types (Mercator, polar stereographic, ...) and stamp it with tectonic features. You can enter coordinates or zoom around to the spot you want. The site uses a simplified version of software used by many geologists; users are advised that it be viewed as an "appetizer for the real thing," which can be reached through a link.

www.aquarius.geomar.de/omc/omc_intro.html