| Contents Notes |
The historical background: From continental drift to plate tectonics / Naomi Oreskes -- 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. Opdyk -- 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 -- 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 / Xavier Le Pichon. -- 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. Collects eighteen essays on the development of the theory of plate tectonics, covering key concepts, terminology, and the contributions of the scientists who helped develop the model that is today widely accepted in the field. 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 1960s to constitute plate tectonics is one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Scholarly books have been written about tectonics, but none by the key scientists-players themselves. In Plate Tectonics, editor Naomi Oreskes has assembled scientists who played key roles in developing the theory to tell - for the first time and in their own words - the stories of their involvement in the extraordinary evolution 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 througout the book. Oreskes explains how the forerunners of the theory, Wegener and du Toit, raised the questions that were finally answered thirty years later, and how scientists working at the key academic institutions - Cambridge and Princeton Universities, Colombia University's Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory, and the University of California-San Diego's Scropps Institution of Oceanography - competed and collaborated until the theory coalesced. -- from back cover. |
