Revised Late Cretaceous and Early Cenozoic Apparent Polar Wander Path for the Pacific Plate

The current apparent polar wander path (APWP) of the Pacific plate suffers from a general lack of detail and has been calculated using some data with questionable reliability. This is especially true of the data set for the Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic which has come largely from seamount anomaly inversions and seafloor magnetic anomaly skewness. In an effort to increase the detail and reliability of the Pacific plate APWP, we used a larger and more diverse data set to calculate four mean poles for the latest Cretaceous and Paleogene. We combined four types of data in order to test data reliability and consistency, and found good agreement among different data types. Over half of the data comes from piston and DSDP/ODP sediment core paleocolatitudes, with the rest made up of paleocolatitudes from DSDP/ODP basalt cores, declinations from seamount anomaly inversions and effective inclinations from magnetic anomaly skewness analyses. Our four mean paleomagnetic poles represent the Oligocene, Eocene, Paleocene and Maastrichtian at 29, 44, 61 and 69 Ma, respectively. The 29 Ma pole is located at 80.1° N, 24.4° E, the 44 Ma pole at 74.4° N, 356.0° E, the 61 Ma pole at 72.2° N, 5.8° E, and the 69 Ma pole at 72.3° N, 355.7° E. The large numbers of data included in this compilation allow for reasonably compact error bounds and the good agreement between data types implies small systematic error. Although a significant percentage of the data are from azimuthally-unoriented cores, which do not provide constraint on paleodeclination, a wide longitudinal distribution of sites, as well as the use of declinations from seamount anomaly inversions gave reasonably good control on pole paleolongitude. While the new APWP exhibits the expected northward motion of the Pacific plate, it also shows a stillstand from the Late Cretaceous until approximately 44 Ma. This stillstand suggests no northward motion of the Pacific plate during this time, a concept at odds with accepted models of Pacific plate motion. The APWP is consistent with DSDP/ODP basalt paleomagnetic data that suggest the Hawaiian-Emperor hotspot moved south during formation of the Emperor Chain, but it implies an amount of motion greater than 20°, if the entire latitude shift is attributed to hotspot drift.