The Plate Tectonics Revolution
We're going to tell the story of a quiet revolution in the 1960s that shifted our entire understanding of how the Earth works. We currently believe that the Earth's broken outer shell rises from the mantle and folds back in - kind of like a dance of creative destruction and reconstruction - giving us our continents and oceans, mountains and valleys, volcanoes, and earthquakes. And it would take a group of scientists all over the world to get us this grand unifying theory of plate tectonics.
Topics
- continental drift
- seafloor spreading
- subduction
- mid-ocean ridges
- deep ocean trenches
- lithosphere
- Earth's surface
- earthquakes
- volcanic activity
- mountain building
- geology
- geophysics
- oceanography
- paleontology
- seismology
- subduction zone
- asthenosphere
- paleomagnetism
- magnetic reversals
- bathymetry
- divergent boundary
- convergent boundary
- transform boundary
- continental shield
- Marie Tharp
- Bruce Heezen
- Harry Hess
- Robert Dietz
- Fred Vine
- Drummond Matthews
- plate tectonics
- pangaea
- ring of fire