TROND H. TORSVIK

Professor of Geodynamics and Founding Director of the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED), University of Oslo, Norway, and Honorary Professor at Wits University, Johannesburg. He is a Member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and was awarded the prestigious Arthur Holmes Medal (European Union of Geosciences) in 2016 and the Leopold Von Buch Medal (German Geological Society) in 2015, among various other awards and prizes. He has written over 200 publications in refereed journals and books.

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L. ROBIN M. COCKS  OBE TD 

Scientific Associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, London, UK, where he was formerly Keeper of Palaeontology. He has been President of the Geological Society of London, the Palaeontological Association, the Geologists’ Association and the Palaeontographical Society. In 1995 he was awarded the Geological Society’s Coke Medal, and in 2010 the Lapworth Medal, by the Paleaontological Association, its highest honour.

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HISTORY OF COLLOBORATION

Our first significant interaction was at the Europrobe meeting at St Petersburg in 1999, with the result that Robin was invited by Trond to the Norwegian Geological Winter-meeting at Trondheim in 2000, after which our collaboration into unravelling global palaeogeography began in earnest. Some years and many joint papers later, we thought that a summary and extension of our work would be timely, and this book is the result. Our specialities are complementary: Trond is a geophysicist specialising in palaeomagnetism and mantle dynamics, whilst Robin specialises in Palaeozoic stratigraphy and faunas. However, both of us had previously published on global and regional palaeogeography, alone and with other colleagues, and we both have first degrees in geology, which has formed the essential common language for appropriate discussion, which has been both challenging and fun. In addition and most importantly, Trond has developed the software to generate flat maps from a spherical Earth and which can move the lithospheric units through time with kinematic objectivity. That means that he has constructed virtually all the diagrams in this book, whilst Robin has written slightly more of the words. Nevertheless we are under no illusions that this book is a final summary of the Earth’s changing geography; merely a progress report.

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"'Earth History and Palaeogeography" by Trond H. Torsvik and L. Robin M. Cocks and published by Cambridge University Press, © Trond H. Torsvik and L. Robin M. Cocks 2016