Geologic history

General considerations

Continents have collided and broken apart repeatedly over geologic time. When they separate, new ocean basins develop between the diverging pieces through the process of seafloor spreading. Spreading, which originates at oceanic ridges, is compensated (to conserve surface area on the planet) by subduction—the process whereby the seafloor flexes and sinks along inclined trajectories into the Earth’s interior—at deep-sea trenches. Closure of ocean basins by subduction of the seafloor results in continental collisions.

The material moved laterally from spreading ridges to subduction zones includes plates of rock up to 60 miles (100 km) thick. This rigid outer shell of the Earth is called the lithosphere, as distinct from the underlying hotter and more fluid asthenosphere. The portions of lithospheric plates descending into the asthenosphere at subduction zones are called slabs. The many lithospheric plates that make up the present surface of the Earth are bounded by an interlinking system of oceanic ridges, subduction zones, and laterally moving fractures known as transform faults. Over geologic time the system of plate boundaries has continually evolved as new plates have formed, expanded, contracted, and disappeared.

The outermost layer of the lithosphere is called the crust. It is composed of low-density material crystallized from molten rock (magma) produced by partial melting of the lithosphere or asthenosphere. The average thickness of the oceanic crust is about 4 miles (6.4 km). Oceanic plateaus and seamounts are localized areas of abnormally thick oceanic crust that have resulted from submarine volcanism promoted by hot jets of magma, or plumes, rising from deep within the Earth’s interior (i.e., from the mantle). Oceanic crust is transient, being formed at the oceanic ridges and destroyed at the trenches. It has a mean age of about 60 million years.

Continental crust is thicker, 22 miles (35 km) on average and less dense than oceanic crust, which accounts for its mean surface elevation of about 3 miles (4.8 km) above that of the ocean floor (Archimedes’ principle). Continental crust is more complex than oceanic crust in its structure and origin and is formed primarily at subduction zones. Lateral growth occurs by the addition of rock scraped off the top of oceanic plates as they are subducted beneath continental margins. Such margins are marked by lines of volcanoes, often in volcanic arcs, that form additions to the crust—the result of partial melting of the wedge of the asthenosphere situated above the descending slab and below the continental plate (melting is promoted by the release of water from the slab, which lowers the melting point in the wedge). Subduction zones located within ocean basins (where one oceanic plate descends beneath another) also generate volcanic arcs; these are called island arcs. Island arcs consist of materials that tend to be transitional between oceanic and continental crust in both thickness and composition. The first continents appear to have formed by accretion of various island arcs.

Continental crust resists subduction. Consequently, the mean age of the continents is almost two billion years, more than 30 times the average age of the oceanic crust. Thus, continents are the prime repositories of information concerning Earth’s geologic evolution, but understanding their formation requires knowledge of processes in the ocean basins from which they evolved.

Tectonic framework

Structural plan

North America is somewhat unusual among the continents in having stable interior lowlands of great antiquity that are almost completely enclosed by younger orogenic belts (belts of former or actual mountain ranges resulting from crustal deformation related to subduction or continental collision). These lowlands include the Canadian (Laurentian) Shield and an interior platform of crystalline rock that is covered by a veneer of virtually flat-lying sedimentary rock.

The continent’s peripheral orogenic belts originated at plate boundaries. They are of Paleozoic age (542 to 251 million years ago) in the east and Mesozoic to Cenozoic age (252.2 million years ago to the present day) in the west. These belts are partly covered, and locally breached, by coastal plain sediments of the Arctic Ocean in the north, the Gulf of Mexico in the south, and relatively young volcanic fields in the west. A gap in the Paleozoic orogenic belts between the Appalachian Mountains of Newfoundland and the East Greenland Caledonides is a consequence of seafloor spreading along a failed arm of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which later stepped eastward to separate the Appalachians and the Greenland Caledonides from the European Caledonides.