Great Geologists | 117
IMPACT OF THE HYPOTHESIS
The stage was now set for evolution of continental drift into plate tectonics, with recognition of the segments of the Earth’s
crust and their motions relative to one another. That would be a story for others to pursue. As a result of his close professional
interaction and friendship with Hess, Vine took a lecturing position at the University of Princeton and returned to the UK in 1970
to be based at the University of East Anglia, where he has spent the rest of his academic career, expanding his interests to
ophiolites and the electrical conductivity of the crust.
It should be noted that at the same time as Vine and Matthews were developing their 1963 hypothesis, a Canadian
geophysicist, Lawrence Morley, was attempting something similar, only to find his paper rejected by both Nature and the
Journal of Geophysical Research (“Such speculation makes interesting talk at cocktail parties, but it is not the sort of thing that
ought to be published under serious scientific aegis,” wrote one withering reviewer). Morley finally had his work published in
1964, leading some to use the term ‘Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis’ for the marrying of seafloor spreading with magnetic
anomaly patterns.
Paleomagnetists are often fondly called “paleomagicians” by other geoscientists. There is no doubt that without the insight
provided by studies of paleomagnetism, the apparently magical movement of the continents would have not have been
demystified. In this respect, Fred Vine’s insightful interpretations were to prove revolutionary.
REFERENCES
This essay has drawn upon the following works:
Frankel, H.R. 2012. The Continental Drift Controversy; Volume IV: Evolution into Plate Tectonics. Cambridge University Press, 675pp.
Glen, W. 1982. The Road to Jaramillo. Stanford University Press, 459pp.
Hallam, A. 1973. A Revolution in the Earth Sciences. Oxford University Press, 127pp.
Kious, W.J. & Tilling, R.I. 1996. This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics. U.S. Department of the Interior, 77pp.
Lawrence, D.M. 2002. Upheaval from the Abyss. Rutgers University Press. 284pp.
Le Grand, H.E. 1988. Shifting Continents and Shifting Theories. Cambridge University Press, 313pp.
Molnar, P. 2015. Plate Tectonics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 136pp.
Morley, L.W. 2001. The Zebra pattern. In: Oreskes, N. (ed.) Plate Tectonics: An Insiders History of the Modern Theory of the Earth.
Westview Press, 67-85.
Oreskes, N. 2013. How plate tectonics clicked. Nature, 501, 27-29.
Powell, J.L. 2015. Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences. Columbia University Press, 367pp.
Vine, F. J. 2001. Reversals of fortune. In: Oreskes, N. (ed.) Plate Tectonics: An Insiders History of the Modern Theory of the Earth.
Westview Press, 46-66.
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