The major continents, geologically speaking, are North America, Greenland, Europe, Siberia, North and South China, and the Gondwana elements of South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia and Antarctica. All consist of older, Precambrian nuclei, many of them true cratons, on which Paleozoic and younger sediments were deposited. This contrasts with the blocks and terranes, as defined in Chapter 3 and discussed in Chapters 7 and 8, which in general have little Precambrian basement exposed.

Paleomagnetic paleopoles have been compiled for all these continents, with the exception of Siberia, and are given in the Appendices. While this compilation was being made, an internationally funded effort started to establish a global paleopole database (McElhinny & Lock, 1990; Lock & McElhinny, 1991); this was deemed necessary because since 1980 (with poles up through 1978) the very helpful catalogues of the Earth Physics Branch in Ottawa and the lists in the Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society had been discontinued or interrupted. My compilation has been cross-checked with that of McElhinny & Lock for completeness and accuracy as best as possible. The entries of this compilation, as discussed in the preceding chapter, have been evaluated with the reliability criteria of Table 4.2.

The entries of the data base of McElhinny & Lock have been compiled from all major national and international journals; to these I have added recently published results and paleopoles from the ‘gray’ literature, that is, publications not generally accessible in major libraries around the world, wherever I have been able to locate them. The nature of such publications, however, implies that some paleopoles may easily have been overlooked!