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The Mission of the Tectonics Special Research Centre is:To discover the supercontinents of which Australia has been part in the past three million years and the processes that formed them. | |
Five objectives are set for the nine-year life of the Centre:
(i) Establishment of the Apparent Polar Wander Paths of the major Precambrian blocks of Australia and formerly contiguous regions to determine their amalgamation and dispersal history.
(ii) Investigation of the supercontinent hypothesis through combined palaeomagnetic, kinematic and tectonostratigraphic analysis.
(iii) Investigation of modern and ancient amalgamation and dispersal processes in continent‹continent and continent island arc settings.
(iv) Investigation of whether plate tectonics as constructed for the last 200 million years of Earth history is applicable for the Earth prior to 1,000 million years ago.
(v) Analogue and numerical modelling of continental amalgamation and dispersal processes.
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The objectives are to be achieved through a set of targets expressed as goals to be achieved by the time of the three- and six-year reviews, and at the end of the nine-year funding.
1. Goals by mid-2002
1.1 Refinement of the Mesoproterozoic and Palaeoproterozoic APWPs for the Kimberley and Pilbara regions through primary investigation.
1.2 Refinement of the Mesoproterozoic and Palaeoproterozoic APWPs for other continental blocks in Australia through primary investigation and determination of new palaeomagnetic poles, in collaboration with other laboratories. |
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1.3 Preliminary evaluation, depending on the quality of late Palaeoproterozoic palaeomagnetic data available, of whether there were any wide ocean basins between the Palaeoproterozoic continental blocks in the late Palaeoproterozoic and Mesoproterozoic.
1.4 Preliminary evaluation of whether there was a Palaeoproterozoic supercontinent similar to late Mesoproterozoic Rodinia and late Palaeozoic Pangea.
1.5 Evaluation of geological events associated with Australia's mid-Cenozoic collision with the Sunda Arc and crossing of the associated subduction zone.
1.6 Completion of analogue modelling of continent-continent convergence zones and preliminary modelling of continent-island arc convergence. |
2. Goals by the end of 2005
2.1 Review and synthesis of the Australian APWPs.
2.2 Production of a set of rotation parameters from which a set of global palaeogeographic maps from 3,000 million years to Present can be produced.
2.3 Production of an interpretative computer-generated set of palaeogeographic maps of the Earth from 3,000 million years to Present.
2.4 Evaluation of whether there were any supercontinents in the late Archaean and early Palaeoproterozoic and from this evaluate whether the hypothesis that supercontinents form regularly on an ~400 million year cycle can be supported.
2.5 An analysis from a geological and modelling perspective of the processes and parameters, which influence processes in continent-continent and continent-island-arc convergence.
2.6 A synthesis of the tectonic evolution of the supercontinents of which Australia has been a part since the late Archaean.
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