Plate kinematics of the North Atlantic

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Abstract
The problem of determining the past relative positions of continents now situated around the North Atlantic has been a challenge to geologists and geophysicists for many years. Yet a solution acceptable to all does not exist. Since the acceptance of the idea of continental drift, a number of reconstructions has been published. The earlier reconstructions, prior to the birth of the plate tectonic theory, were done qualitatively in order to match morphological features of the continental margins (Choubert, 1935) or geological boundaries on land. The first quantitative fit of the North Atlantic was published by Bullard and others (1965) who described the motion between continents or plates as angular rotation about a set of poles. Since then a number of papers have been published showing reassembly of continents during various stages of evolution of the North Atlantic using magnetic anomalies in the oceanic regions as isochrons or plate boundaries and fracture zones as the direction of motion between plates. The most notable of these are by Pitman and Talwani (1972), Laughton (1971, 1972), Williams (1975), LePichon and others (1977), Sclater and others (1977), Kristoffersen and Talwani (1977) , Talwani and Eldholm (1977), Kristoffersen (1978), Srivastava (1978, 1985), Olivet and others (1981), Unternehr (1982), Nunns (1983), and Vink (1982, 1984). Most of these reconstructions are based on a limited amount of geophysical information from one or more regions of the North Atlantic available at the time of publication. Thus different criteria and assumptions had to be made

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