Arkell.1956.Jurassic..

THE OCEANS
ice-caps in the Mesozoic, since a rich temperate flora lived simultaneously
in Greenland and Grahamland, nor by postulating a permanent dense
cloud-cover full of suspended water, since neither the flora nor the fauna
admit of such an assumption; and jellyfish washed up at Solnhofen in
Bavaria were dried so rapidly by hot sun that they did not have time to
decompose or to be caught by the next tide and destroyed while still soft.
Moreover, since the Jurassic period there have been major orogenies,
which indicate considerable shrinking of the lithosphere without corresponding
reduction of the hydrosphere, so that there is now more sea
relative to the surface of the solid earth.
Accordingly we have to construct our maps so as to accommodate
at least as much water as there is on the earth at present; which leaves us
the choice between supposing that the major oceans were more or less as
they are now, or arranged in some radically different way. Before investigating
the second alternative it behoves us to weigh what evidence there is
for and against the first. Indeed, the first alternative is so infinitely simpler
and a priori more probable, that very cogent evidence needs to be adduced
before any reasonable man should want to abandon it. (See Jeffreys,
1952, chs. 11, 12).
The following pages briefly review the evidence for the Jurassic period.
PACIFIC OCEAN
The Pacific Ocean is surrounded by a ring of Jurassic rocks from New
Zealand to Patagonia. That this was a geosynclinal ring is not disputed.
But if it surrounded a vast Pacific continent as inferred by Haug (1900),
Kober (1928, p. 361) and others, the faunas should show a complete lack
of cross-connexions; which they do not. To account for supposed connexions
between the Lias of Japan and western North America, and the
Tithonian of New Guinea and Chile, Gregory (1930, p. cxi) postulated
two separate, long, narrow, east-west seas dividing the continent into
three parts. Both these postulates incur the insuperable difficulty of
displacing the water from nearly half the globe without providing adequate
accommodation for it elsewhere.
The alternative hypothesis, eloquently elaborated by Stille (1944, 1948),
that the whole Pacific is and always has been a primordial ocean (Urozean)
with a relatively rigid floor (Tiefkraton), avoids these fundamental difficulties
and is to that extent preferable. There is no warrant, however,
for supposing that the Pacific half of the earth's surface necessarily had a
much simpler history than the other half. There are indications that
uniformity is by no means the rule: for instance the large area in the middle
covered by coral islands must have been sinking steadily for thousands of
feet in Tertiary to Recent times, and on the border of the coral island zone
there is evidence for migrating anticlines and synclines (Chubb, 1934).
As compensation for these sinking areas, other areas (such as the western
Albatross plateau ?) may well have undergone elevation.
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