Can anyone today imagine the earth without its puzzle-piece construction of plate tectonics? The very term, "plate tectonics," coined only thirty-five years ago, is now part of the vernacular, part of everyone's understanding of the way the earth works. The theory, research, data collection, and analysis that came together in the late 1960's to constitute plate tectonics is one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. Scholarly books have been written about tectonics, but none by the key scientists-players themselves. In Plate Tectonics, editor Naomi Oreskes has assembled those scientists who played crucial roles in developing the theory to tell - for the first time, and in their own words - the stories of their involvement in the extraordinary confrimation of the theory. The book opens with an overview of the history of plate tectonics, including in-context definitions of the key terms that are discussed throughout the book. Oreskes explains how the forerunners of the theory, Wegener and du Toit, raised questions that were finally answered thirty years later, and how scientists working at the key academic institutions - Cambridge and Princeton Universities, Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory, and the University of California-San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography - competed and collaborated until the theory coalesced.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Preface Part 1: The Historical Background * From Continetal Drift to Plate Tectonics Part 2: The Early Work: From Paleomagnetism to Sea Floor Spreading * Stripes on the Sea Floor Ron Mason * Reversals of Fortune Frederick J. Vine * The Zebra Pattern Lawrence W. Morley * On Board the Eltanin-19 Walter Pitman * The Birth of Plate Tectonics Neil D. Opdyke Part 3: Heat Flow and Seismology * How Mobile is the Earth Gordon J. MacDonald * Heat Flow Under the Oceans John G. Sclater * Locating Earthquakes and Plate Boundaries Bruce A. Bolt * Earthquake Seismology in the Plate Tectonics Revolution Jack Oliver Part 4: The Plate Model * Plate Tectonics: A Surprising Way to Start a Scientific Career Dan McKenzie * When Plates Were Paving Stones Robert L. Parker * My Conversion to Plate Tectonics Zvier Le Pichon Part 5: From the Oceans to the Continents * Plate Tectonics and Geology, 1965 to Today John F. Dewey * When the Plate Tectonic Revolution Met Western North America Tanya Atwater * The Coming of Plate Tectonics to the Pacific Rim William R. Dickinson * From Plate Tectonics to Continental Tectonics Peter Molnar Epilogue: Continents Really Do Move * Plate Tectonics: A Martian View David T. Sandwell Notes Further Reading Index

Prizes

Reviews

When the fundamentals of plate tectonics are explained in any basic geology textbook, it is easy to forget that in the 1960s it was a revolutionary idea that completely transformed earth science. "As the far-reaching success of these ideas became clear, we all rapidly became famous," writes Dan McKenzie, then a geophysics graduate student at Cambridge who launched his academic career on the new discoveries. McKenzie is one of 17 scientists invited to contribute personal memories of those early days to this collection of essays, edited by Oreskes (history, Univ. of California, San Diego). This is an important historical record, and it is fascinating to read how, once the data became available, the details of sea-floor spreading, mid-oceanic ridges, and subduction zones began to form a complete and convincing model. Nonetheless, this is largely an academic history of research and conferences, computer models, and the race to publish. For an overview of how plate tectonics works, academic libraries should buy a textbook such as Kent C. Condie's Plate Tectonics and Crustal Evolution (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997. 4th ed.), and school libraries should consider Helen Roney Sattler and Giulio Maestro's Our Patchwork Planet (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1995). Amy Brunvand, Univ. of Utah Lib., Salt Lake City Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Readers who went to school before the late 1960s will probably remember that their science teachers couldn't explain why South America and Africa seemed to fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. It was not until 1968 that the theory of plate tectonics was formulated and quickly accepted by scientists around the world. This collection of 18 essays is written by the researchers (such as Frederick J. Vine and Lawrence Morley) who made the discoveries that established the phenomenon of plate tectonics. While the idea of "continental drift" had been proposed as early as 1596 and reappeared at various times throughout history, scientists had always rejected it. Then in the late 1950s and '60s, geologists discovered great rifts in the undersea mountain ranges that girdle the ocean, as well as regular patterns of alternating magnetic polarities in the ocean floor. These and other findings confirmed continental drift and explained the existence of volcanic islands and even earthquakes en masse. Readers with little or no background in geology will be able to follow these well-written and generally jargon-free personal accounts, but the book will appeal most to hard-core science buffs and budding geophysicists. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.