Talk:Columbia (supercontinent)

First supercontinent

Uh, guys? All the pages on early continents (Columbia, Kenorland, Ur, Vaalbara, etc) say that their continent or supercontinent was "the first". This is because geologists formerly thought that plate tectonics started with the process that assembled Pangea, and that previous geology consisted merely of scraping up oceanic basalt and churning it into granite.

The Earth is now understood to have a "supercontinent oscillation", with an accretion and breakup wavelength of ~500 million years, stretching all the way back to the Hadean. This means the earliest cratons should all be labeled as the "earliest IDENTIFIABLE" structure of their type... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.91.89.162 (talk) 21:46, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Not true. Supercontinent cycle or Wilson cycle is hardly a 'cycle'. Plate teconics as we know it didn't exst in Archaean and definitely not in Hadean. It was probably much more vigorous with lots of small plates and relatively small continents (like Vaalbara or Ur). Columbia is probably the first of true supercontinents (and one of just three), understood as the agglomeration of >75% continental blocks of Earth. Szczureq (talk) 14:47, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Copy-pasted content

I added a {{Close paraphrasing}} template to the page since 90% of the content is copy pasted from sources now mentioned in the reference section. The article needs to be reworded. --Fama Clamosa (talk) 16:18, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Assembly

this is wrong: * the East Antarctica and an unknown continental block were joined by the Transantarctic Mountains Orogen. The Transantarctic Orogen is not older than 65 my! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chillibilli (talk • contribs) 13:50, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this. This Columbia (supercontinent) Wikipedia article seems to accurately report what is stated in its cited source reference (Zhao et al. 2002) which is a peer-reviewed scientific journal article. The cited source's statement does seem to be incorrect but I am not very familiar with the geology of Antarctica. I think an ancestral version of the Transantarctic Mountains was formed by the Late Ruker Orogeny about 1,000 million years ago. The only Antarctic orogeny that I have found that fits with the time period of the assembly of the Columbia supercontinent is the Early Ruker Orogeny at about 2,000 to 1,700 million years ago, but this seems to have been confined to East Antarctica and therefore appears unrelated to the Transantarctic Mountains (both the late Proterozoic ancestral version and the Cenozoic version). My source is "Antarctic Marine Geology" by J.B Anderson (1999), pages 30-33. GeoWriter (talk) 16:27, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

The Ruker Province lies in den Prince Charles Mountains, far away from the Transantarctic Orogen. The precursor is the Ross-Orogen, please see german Wiki [1]. The evolution of east-gondwana is also in the german Wiki Ostgondwana [2].--Chillibilli (talk) 15:39, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

This seems a good and very recent review of the tectonic history of the Transantarctic Mountains. I haven't dived deeply into it but will do so as opportunity permits. Meanwhile, I would suggest eliminating the explicit reference to Zhao and others at the stat of this list (keeping the citation, of course) to better accommodate tweaks citing more recent research. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 19:08, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I went ahead and removed the explicit reference to Zhao and changed the disputed statement to refer to the Nimrod orogeny (per cited source) rather than the much younger Transantarctic Mountains. @Chillibilli:, let me know if this resolves your concerns. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 19:19, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

To add to article

Basic information to add to this article: the etymology/origin of these supercontinent names such as "Nuna" and "Columbia," and who named them. 173.88.246.138 (talk) 05:11, 18 February 2021 (UTC)