Response to Comment on “Major Australian-Antarctic Plate Reorganization

• Main Authors: C. Gaina, A. Goncharov, Australian Bight/wilkes L, Conjugate Mar
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Newfoundland; Indian; Antarc*; Labrador Sea
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.657.3753; http://earthbyte.org/people/dietmar/Pdf/Whittaker_etal_TechCommResponse_Science_2008.pdf

Accurately locating boundaries between continental and oceanic crust is topical in view of locating offshore boundaries relevant to margin formation models, plate kinematics, and frontier resource exploration. Although we disagree with Tikku and Direen's interpretations, the associated controversies reflect an absence of agreed-upon geophysical criteria for distinguishing stretched continental from oceanic crust, and a lack of samples from nonvolcanic margins. So-called transitional crust along rifted mar-gins often exhibits symmetric magneticlineations. Prime examples can be found in the Labrador Sea (1), on the Newfoundland-Iberia margins (2), in the Laxmi Basin in the northwest Indian Ocean (3), and on the Great