PLATE TECTONICS





We don't know how our primeval ancestors reacted to earthquakes or when one of them first noticed a subsequent change to his or her immediate environment and connected the two. Certainly someone noticed when a strip of land fell away or a shoreline forest flooded or an occupied cave collapsed. When our ancestors began cultivating crops and building permanent settlements, earthquakes became of greater interest, damaging buildings and displacing property lines. Today, we've all seen pictures of split fences once joined and now separated by a few inches or feet.

We also have heard how early cartographers frequently commented on the similarity between the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa. Too, as geology and paleontology matured as sciences in the 17 and 1800s, the similarity of fossils and rock formations on opposite sides of the oceans and fossilized sea shells on mountain tops were sometimes discussed but more as curiosities than as anything else. It was left to a meteorologist, Alfred Lothar Wegener, to put it all together to propose a theory of Continental Drift for which he was savagely attacked despite his credentials as both a respected scientist and a "pioneer of polar research". Sadly he died on one of his polar expeditions long before his hypothesis was finally accepted after the discovery of paleomagnetism, and, yes, the recognition that some specific microfossils and, indeed, some of the big beasts, had somehow transported themselves between what today are widely separated continents.

By the 1950s, the growing body of evidence that we were living on moving continents could no longer be denied, but it still faced a major stumbling block. No one could figure out exactly how and why it was happening. A 1947 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution expedition had confirmed the existance of an Atlantic ridge, but it was not until 1960 that a paper by Bruce Heezen (per his work with Marie Tharp) described how new crust was continually being produced along what they called the "Great Global Rift". This was the game changer and quickly buttressed in the very same year by Robert R. Coats seminal work on the Aleutian Islands subduction zone. We now knew how, and to some extent where, land was both being created and destroyed again.

In the sixty-plus years since, Continental Drift -- or to use the scientific term -- Plate Tectonics has become a discipline of its own, describing the creation and the movement of the continents in a dance that began as much as 3.8 billion years ago and is likely to continue until either Earth's core cools completely or our own dying Sun swallows Earth.

It is now generally believed that plate tectonics is the mechanism that has created all Earth environments and, consequently, the life in or on them which is where paleontology comes in. The two disciplines now work hand-in-glove, each necessary to better understand longstanding mysteries of this planet and how life developed.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener