Worldwide distribution of the Glossopteris lineage – The significance of crustal and seawater events
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5564/mgs.v30i61.4600Keywords:
glossopteris, flora migration, Permian, crustal development, seawater historyAbstract
In support of the continental drift hypothesis, Alfred Wegener considered Glossopteris to be the dominating vegetation of his Gondwana continental merger near the Permian South Pole. But the plant's supposed ability to thrive in polar conditions has remained an enigma that has sparked a flood of ad hoc ecological mechanisms. Also, the glossopteris group of terrestrial vegetation has remained highly controversial, not least with regard to its distribution to all continents. In an attempt to find a reasonable explanation for the seemingly endless riddle, this article addresses two critical questions: the evolution of seawater and that of the deep-sea crust. The evaluation is based entirely on observational rock facts from the geoscientific literature - not from modelling, including inverted satellite gravity-derived seafloor topography. The analysis brings us back to the palaeontologists’ classical land bridges. The Indian Ocean is given special attention. At the end of the Palaeozoic, the original continental crust was still in an early stage of "oceanization", and the generally shallow ocean basins at that time were divided by a network of intercontinental ridges and plateaus. Thus, terrestrial flora and fauna had open migration routes between India, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and the Americas. In the new paleogeographic development scheme, the overwhelming part of the Glossopteris habitat and dispersal routes occurred in tropical to warm mid-latitudes. There are no reasons to believe that glossopteris grew under polar conditions.
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