Tectonic episodes of cratons: conflicting North American concepts

Over the past one hundred years North American geologists have been influenced by concepts of Earth history based on periodic events involving marked (‘Neocatastrophic’) changes and competing concepts involving steady-state (‘Uniformitanan’) behaviour. T.C. Chamberlin, a late 19th-/early 20th-Century exponent of a nonuniformitarian scenario of earth history, proclaimed ‘diastrophism as the ultimate basis of correlation’ - meaning that geological history is punctuated by orogenic paroxysms causing retreat of epicontinental waters to oceanic basins, creating segmentation of the stratigraphic and chronological record. At mid-Century James Gilluly gained wide support for the proposition that orogeny has followed a Uniformitarian, near-steady-state course. Accordingly, episodic diastrophism is a myth and cannot be the basis for periodic eustatic sea-level change, interregional unconformities, etc. In more recent decades two powerful new influences on geological thought have emerged. The global tectonic paradigm has forced upon us the realization that rearrangements of lithospheric plates are capable of changing the freeboard of continents. At the same time technological advances in the acquisition and processing of seismic-reflection data have been seized by receptive minds to organize the newly available stratigraphic imagery for application to the discipline of seismic stratigraphy which emphasizes the identification and correlation of unconformity-bounded successions of strata. Expansion of the methodology to the outcrop, beyond the limitations of seismic resolution, has brought about the flowering of the New Sequence Stratigraphy, doctrine that has deservedlyachieved wide application and acclaim. Practitioners of sequence stratigraphy, impressed by the distances over which unconformity-bounded stratal units can be correlated, hew to the belief that eustatic (commonly glacially engendered) sea-level change is the control. This paper examines evidence of tectonic episodes affecting cratons and their margins. These offer promise of a more satisfactory understanding of stratigraphic sequences and of the Earth history they represent. Consideration of these matters makes it inescapable that the elevation and subsidence of cratons (and their component basins and arches) reflect tectonic phenomena of the continental lithosphere quite independent of eustatic events.