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Record W4417528746 · doi:10.12789/geocanj.2025.52.226

A Tectonic History of the Earth

2025· article· en· W4417528746 on OpenAlexaffvenue
J. Brendan Murphy

Bibliographic record

VenueGeoscience Canada · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Science and Natural History
Canadian institutionsSt. Francis Xavier University
Fundersnot available
Keywordsnot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Graham Park is a veteran of several textbooks.For more than a decade, I assigned his text "Foundations of Structural Geology" to my undergraduate students and so I am aware of his impressive skills of being able to present difficult concepts and distill the information that separates the wheat from the chaff.His direct and focused writing style is ideally suited for a textbook in structural geology where the foundational concepts are reasonably well understood, enabling the course instructor to build on that foundation by selecting topics of their choice to embellish the course content.The very economic and linear writing style of that textbook was very popular with students.When I was asked to review this book, my expectation was that if anyone could tackle the monumental task of writing a book on the tectonic history of the Earth, Park would be my best bet.I was also curious how his writing style would translate to the field of tectonics in which many foundational concepts, such as when modern-style plate tectonics began on Earth, are debated.My high expectations have been exceeded.I strongly recommend this book for all engaged in tectonics research from the newly minted graduate student to the most wrinkled professor.The text benefits from the same economic, linear writing style that characterizes "Foundations".As such, it provides the foundational knowledge that would underpin many future research topics in tectonic processes and provides a global context for those working on more focused topics within specific orogenic belts.Thus, this book would be a valuable starting point for virtually any subject that the researcher would want to explore.The trade-off for a parsimonious writing style is that many concepts are presented and explained briefly.Also, the reader may not agree with all its contents but, as I used to tell my students, in those disagreements lie the seeds of future research topics.If I were to teach a graduate course on tectonics, I would definitely assign this as a textbook.On specific topics where I would want to foster debate in the class, I would bolster its content with papers from the literature that advocate contrasting models or approaches.As I started to compile a list of such papers, I noted that several were recommended by the author as "Additional References".The book has eleven chapters, arranged in time sequence, starting with the birth of planet Earth (chapter 1) and concluding with a speculative chapter on Earth's future (chapter 11).Each chapter is lavishly illustrated with coloured figures.In most chapters, these illustrations are tectonic reconstructions, including palaeogeographic maps and cross-sections, and some photographs of rocks and field relationships.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.930
Threshold uncertainty score0.344

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0040.007
Science and technology studies0.0080.014
Scholarly communication0.0060.003
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0150.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.162
Teacher spread0.151 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractno

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