A new paradigm for the North Atlantic Realm

The North Atlantic Realm, defined as the region of Pangaea breakup north of the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone, is the type example locality for the Wilson Cycle. It is the first place where Wegener's continental drift hypothesis was tested using geodetic surveying and the source of some of the data most influential to development of the plate tectonic hypothesis. The region nevertheless, in many respects, stubbornly refused to fit neatly into the very hypotheses in whose birth it was so influential.