From Continental Drift To Plate Tectonics: Naomi Oreskes
From Continental Drift To Plate Tectonics: Naomi Oreskes
From Continental Drift To Plate Tectonics: Naomi Oreskes
3
4 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
miles (80 to 100 kilometers) of the earth's surface (now called the litho-
sphere), and move at a rate of 1 to 4 inches (3 to 10 centimeters) per
year. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountains are concentrated on plate
margins where two plates collide, split apart, or slide past one another.
Moreover, the global configuration of continents and oceans is con-
stantly changing. As Wegener suggested, the breakup of Pangea pro-
duced the configuration of continents and oceans that we have today.
since the mid-century, but they had been made newly problematic by
Darwin's theory of evolution. If plants and animals had evolved inde-
pendently in different places within diverse environments, then why did
they look so similar? Suess explained this conundrum by attributing
these similar species to an early geological age when the continents were
contiguous in an ancient supercontinent called Gondwanaland.2
Suess' theory was widely discussed and to varying degrees accepted
in Europe, but in North America geologist James Dwight Dana (1813-
1895) had developed a different version of contraction theory. Dana
suggested that the continents had formed early in earth history, when
low-temperature minerals such as quartz and feldspar had solidified.
Then the globe continued to cool and contract, until the high-temper-
ature minerals such as olivine and pyroxene finally solidified: on the
moon, to form the lunar craters; on Earth, to form the ocean basins. As
contraction continued after Earth was solid, its surface began to deform.
The boundaries between continents and oceans took up most of the
pressure—like the seams on a dress—and so mountains began to form
along continental margins. With continued contraction came continued
deformation, but with the continents and oceans always in the same rel-
ative positions.3 Although Dana's theory was a version of contraction, it
came to be known as permanence theory, because it viewed continents
and oceans as globally permanent features.
In North America, permanence theory was linked to the theory of geo-
synclines: subsiding sedimentary basins along continental margins. This
idea was developed primarily by James Hall (1811-1889), state paleontol-
ogist of New York and the first president of the Geological Society of Amer-
ica (1889). Hall noted that, beneath the forest cover, the Appalachian
mountains were built up of folded layers of shallow-water sedimentary
rocks, thousands of feet thick. How did these sequences of shallow-water
deposits form? How were they folded and uplifted into mountains? Hall
suggested that materials eroded off the continents accumulated in the
adjacent marginal basins, causing the basins to subside. Subsidence
allowed more sediments to accumulate, causing more subsidence, until
finally the weight of the pile caused the sediments to be heated, converted
to rock, and then uplifted into mountains.4 (The process of uplift, or
mountain-building, is called orogeny.} Dana modified Hall's view by argu-
ing that thick sedimentary piles were not the cause of subsidence but the
result of it. Either way the theory provided a concise explanation of how
thick sequences of shallow-water rocks could accumulate, but was vague
on the question of how they were transformed into mountain belts.
6 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
CONTINENTAL DRIFT AS ALTERNATIVE
TO CONTRACTION THEORY
and therefore they could not sink to become ocean basins. Continents
and oceans were not interchangeable.
Third, and most fundamental, physicists discovered radiogenic heat,
which contradicted the basic assumption of contraction theory that the
earth was steadily cooling. With contraction no longer assumed, earth
scientists were motivated to search for other driving forces of deforma-
tion. By the 1920s, many considered the science to be in a state of crisis:
with contraction theory discredited, how were geologists to account for
the evidence of prior continental connections? How were they to rec-
oncile the evidence from historical geology for the changing configura-
tion of land masses with the apparent permanence of continents and
oceans? This crisis was felt most acutely by European geologists who
had accepted Suess' theory, but Americans also realized that they faced
a dilemma. A number of scientists began to put forward alternative
theories of continental fragmentation or migration. Alfred Wegener
(1880-1930) is the most significant, for his theory was the most widely
discussed at the time, and the one that was later vindicated.
A pioneering meteorologist and author of an early text on the ther-
modynamics of the atmosphere, Wegener realized that paleoclimate
change could be explained if continents had migrated across climate
zones and the reconfiguration of land masses altered Earth's climate pat-
terns.6 However, continental drift was more than just a theory of paleo-
climate change. Wegener explicitly presented his theory as a means to
reconcile historical geology with isostasy: on the one hand, paleonto-
logical evidence that the continents had once been connected; on the
other, geodetic evidence that they could not be connected in the way
European contractionists had supposed by now-sunken crust. Wegener's
answer was to reconnect the continents by moving them laterally.
Wegener's theory was widely discussed in the 1920s and early 1930s.
It was also hotly rejected, particularly by geologists in the United States,
who labeled it bad science. The standard explanation for the rejection
of continental drift is the lack of a causal mechanism, but this explana-
tion is false. There was a spirited and rigorous international debate over
the possible mechanisms of continental migration, which ultimately set-
tled on the same explanation generally accepted today for plate tecton-
ics: convection currents in the earth's mantle.
The debate over the mechanism of continental drift centered on the
implications of isostasy. If continents floated in a denser substrate, then
this substrate had to be either fluid or plastic, and continents could at least
in principle move through it. There was good evidence that this was
indeed the case: in Scandinavia, geologists had documented a progressive
8 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
uplift of Finland and Scandinavia since the end of the Pleistocene epoch
(10,000 years ago), which they called the Fennoscandian rebound. The
accepted explanation for this phenomenon was that during the Pleis-
tocene epoch, the region had been depressed under the weight of a thick
sheet of glacial ice; as the ice gradually melted, the land surface gradually
rebounded. This provided empirical evidence that continents could move
through the substrate in which they were embedded, at least in the verti-
cal direction and at least during the Pleistocene. However, in Scandinavia
the cause of motion was generally agreed: first the weight of glacial ice,
then the pressure release upon its removal. What force would cause hori-
zontal movement? Would the substrate respond to horizontal movement
as it did to vertical movement? Debate over the mechanisms of drift con-
centrated on the long-term behavior of the substrate and the forces that
could cause continents to move laterally.
In the United States, the question was addressed by Harvard geology
professor Reginald A. Daly (1871-1957), North America's strongest
defender of continental drift. Daly argued that the key to tectonic prob-
lems was to be found in the earth's layered structure. Advances in seis-
mology suggested that the earth contained three major layers: crust, sub-
strate (or mantle), and core. The substrate, he suggested, might be
glassy, and therefore could flow in response to long-term stress just as old
plates of glass gradually thicken at their lower edges and glassy lavas flow
downhill. Continents might do the same. Building on the geosyncline
concept of Dana and Hall, Daly suggested that sedimentation along the
continental margins resulted in subtle elevation differences, which in
turn produced gravitational instabilities. Eventually, the continent could
rupture, sliding down over the glassy substrate under the force of grav-
ity. The sliding fragment would then override the other half—an early
suggestion of subduction—and, over time, the accumulation of small
increments of sliding would result in global continental drift.7
Daly urged his American colleagues to take up the question of drift,
but few did. Reaction in Europe was more favorable. Irish geologist John
Joly (1857-1933) linked the question to discoveries in radioactivity.
Trained as a physicist, Joly had demonstrated that the commonly
observed dark rings in micas—so-called pleochroic haloes—were caused
by radiation damage from tiny inclusions of uranium- and thorium-bear-
ing minerals, such as apatite. Radioactive elements were therefore ubiq-
uitous in rocks, suggesting that radiogenic heat was also ubiquitous. If it
was, then it could be a force for geological change. Joly proposed that as
radiogenic heat accumulated, the substrate would begin to melt. During
these episodes of melting, the continents could move under the influ-
ence of small forces, such as minor gravitational effects, that would oth-
erwise be ineffectual.8 Periodic melting, associated with magmatic cycles
caused by the build-up of radiogenic heat, would lead to the periods of
global mountain-building that many geologists saw evidence of when
they compared the geology of Europe and North America.
Joly's theory responded to a geophysical complaint against a plastic
substrate, voiced most clearly by Cambridge geophysicist Harold Jeffreys
(later Sir Harold), that the propagation of seismic waves indicated a fully
solid and rigid Earth. Jeffreys argued on physical grounds that continen-
tal drift was impossible in a solid, rigid Earth; Joly noted that although
Earth was solid now, it might not always have been. More widely credited
was the suggestion of British geologist Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) that
the substrate was partially molten or glassy—like magma. Underscoring
arguments made by Wegener, Holmes emphasized that the substrate did
not need to be liquid, only plastic, and that it might be rigid under high
strain rates (during seismic events) yet still be ductile under the low strain
rates that prevailed during orogeny (mountain-building). If it was plastic
in response to long-term stress, then continents could move within it.
10 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Teddy (later Sir Edward) Bullard, taking a break from gravity measure-
ments in East Africa, ca. 1937. The photograph was taken by Bullard's first
wife, Margaret Lady Bullard, and supplied courtesy of Robert Parker,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Harry Hess' tectogene concept explaining the origins of ocean deeps associ-
ated with negative gravity anomalies, from Hess (1933), Interpretation of geo-
logical and geophysical observations, in The Navy-Princeton Gravity Expedition
to the West Indies in 1932, edited by R. M. Field. Washington, D.C., U.S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, p. 30.
The year was 1939, and Griggs and Hess had hit upon what scientists
would later affirm as the rate of plate motions. But before they could go
any further, World War II broke out.
In the 1920s the Navy had been cautious about funding basic scientific
research, concerned about the appropriate expenditure of Navy funds
and doubtful that work such as gravity measurement was likely to be of
operational use. World War II changed the situation, largely because of
submarine warfare. Allied forces suffered heavy losses in the early part
of the war from attack by German U-boats, and the U.S. Navy realized
that geophysics and oceanography might provide means to detect or
avoid submarines. Particularly salient were two lines of research: mag-
netics, which might provide direct means of submarine detection, and
physical oceanography, which might guide evasive maneuvers.
In the early 1940s, the U.S. Navy was experiencing difficulties with its
sonar equipment, which tended not to work well in the afternoon.
Thinking that marine organisms were interfering with transmissions (or
that operators were dozing off after lunch), the Navy asked Maurice
Ewing, then working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to
investigate. Together with colleague J. Lamar (Joe) Worzel, Ewing dis-
covered that temperature effects were bending the sound waves in such
a way as to create a "shadow zone"—a region in which sonar transmis-
sions went undetected. This discovery had enormous implications for
submarine warfare: if a submarine commander could accurately locate
the shadow zone, he could hide his ship within it. Moreover, Ewing and
Worzel discovered that under certain conditions sound waves would be
focused into a narrow region, in which they traveled for great distances.
From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics 17
They called this phenomenon sound channeling, and it became the basis
for SOFAR (SOund Fixing and Ranging), which the Navy used during
the war to locate downed airmen, and SOSUS (SOund SUrveillance Sys-
tem), the Navy's Cold War underwater acoustic array established to
detect Soviet submarines.19
While Ewing worked on underwater sound in a civilian capacity, Hess
joined the Naval Reserve and in 1941 was called to active duty. He
became the captain of an assault transport, the USS Cape Johnson, and
among her tasks was the echo-sounding of the Pacific basin. This was a
project with both military and scientific significance: for the Navy, an
accurate topographic map of the sea floor would provide captains with
an independent check on their navigation; for scientists, understanding
of the sea floor would be greatly enhanced by knowing its shape and
structure. This latter hope was fulfilled by Hess' discovery of "guyots"—
flat-topped mountains, which he named after Arnold Guyot, the first
professor of geology at Princeton. Hess interpreted these mountains as
ancient volcanoes whose tops had been eroded by wave action as they
gradually sank on a subsiding ocean floor.20 Guyots were strong evidence
that the ocean basins were not fossils of an early stage of earth history,
but were geologically active throughout time.
By war's end, the U.S. Navy was convinced of the value of geophysical
research. Through the newly established Office of Naval Research
(ONR), funds began to flow generously into American laboratories.21
Three institutions particularly benefited from ONR support: Woods
Hole, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the newly created
Lament Geological Observatory at Columbia University, now directed by
Ewing. Work at these institutions focused on physical oceanography for
its relation to underwater sound, magnetics for its relevance to subma-
rine detection, and bathymetry for mapping the sea floor. At Scripps and
Lament, seismology—the study of earthquakes and how shock waves
travel through the earth—was also developed, first as means to investi-
gate the structure of the sea floor and the nature of earthquakes; later
to detect underground nuclear explosions.
The years 1945-1970 may well have been the most exciting time in the
history of American earth science, as abundant funding led to a new age
of scientific exploration—not to get across the oceans, but to spend time
within and under them, and ultimately to understand them. Woods
Hole, Scripps, and Lament launched a series of major oceanographic
expeditions, collecting an enormous quantity of diverse data on the
bathymetry and structure of the sea floor, the physical and chemical
properties of the water column, the air-sea interaction and generation
18 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
of waves and currents, the sediments on the sea floor, and the magnetic
and gravity signatures of the solid rocks at the bottom of the sea. More
was learned about the oceans during these 25 years than in the entire
previous history of science. But there was one downside: much of the
data gathered was classified.
to borrow 37.4 pounds (17 kilograms) of pure gold from the Royal Mint,
which he rotated at high speed to simulate the effects of the more mas-
sive earth moving at lower speed.24 The experiment failed—no discern-
able field was generated.
Meanwhile, Bullard had become an advocate of an alternative view:
that the earth's field resulted from transient factors such as convection
currents in a liquid iron core—the so-called dynamo theory.25 This led
Bullard to conceive a test of the two theories. If Blackett were correct,
and the magnetic field arose from the total mass of the earth (like grav-
ity) , then it would be a distributed property and the intensity of mag-
netism would decrease with depth (as does gravity). On the other hand,
if Bullard were correct, the strength of the planetary magnetic field
would be unaffected by depth. This suggestion was taken up by Black-
ett's Manchester colleague, S. K. (Keith) Runcorn (1922-1995), who
began taking magnetometers down the shafts of coal mines. He found
no depth effect, and by 1951 it was clear that Blackett's theory was wrong.
At this point, Runcorn and Blackett turned their attention to mag-
netism in rocks. If the magnetic field was transient, then the history of
variations in the magnetic field might be recorded in rock remanent
magnetism—the ancient magnetic signatures of rocks. In the early 20th
century, Pierre Curie had discovered that rocks cooled in a magnetic
field take on the polarity of that field (the temperature at which this
occurs eventually became known as the Curie point). Therefore, if the
magnetic field varied, these variations might be recorded in rocks, par-
ticularly volcanic rocks that began life as magmas at temperatures above
the Curie point. There was evidence that this was so dating back to the
early 20th century; more recently the idea had been revived by Jan Hos-
pers, a Dutch graduate student who had entered the Ph.D. program at
Cambridge in 1949 trying to use remanent magnetism to correlate lava
flows in Iceland, and by John Graham, working in the United States at
the Carnegie Institution of Washington.26 Runcorn, now back at Cam-
bridge, borrowed Blackett's magnetometer and began to develop a geo-
magnetic research group. He also hired a field assistant, a recent geol-
ogy graduate named Edward (Ted) Irving. Runcorn and Irving began a
program of collecting samples of rocks from different age strata (rock
layers) in the United Kingdom.
In 1953, Blackett moved to Imperial College, London, where he set up
his own remanent magnetism group. He also encountered geology pro-
fessor H. H. Read, the man who inspired Arthur Holmes to make geology
his professional focus. During the war years with few students to teach,
Holmes had written a comprehensive textbook that had an extensive
20 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
tion with sea water; Scripps geologist Robert Dietz (1914-1995) modi-
fied the hypothesis by arguing that the ocean crust was formed by sub-
marine basalt eruptions, and gave it the name it holds today: sea floor
spreading. Dietz's interpretation was later confirmed by direct examina-
tion of the sea floor.
Hess referred to his paper as an "essay in geopoetry," no doubt to
deflect criticism from the many North Americans who were still hostile
to continental drift.31 While the British had generally viewed the out-
come of the 1920s debate as a stalemate, and therefore open to recon-
sideration on the basis of new data, Americans generally believed that
drift had been refuted.32 It would take more work to convince North
American scientists to reconsider. Moreover, while Hess grew convinced
of continental drift on the basis of the apparent polar-wandering paths,
others doubted the paleomagnetic data. While it was true that some rock
sequences produced highly coherent patterns, others were less coher-
ent, and some were reversely magnetized. That is, the polarity of the mag-
netic field recorded in the rock was opposite to Earth's magnetic field.
Most people interpreted this as a sign that the data were unstable: some
rocks accurately recorded the surrounding magnetic field, others didn't.
Perhaps some minerals did not record the surrounding field, but some-
how reversed the direction. Or perhaps the polarities were altered by
later events.
Or perhaps Earth's magnetic field periodically reversed its polarity.
Early in the 20th century, French physicists B. Brunhes and P. L. Mer-
canton had suggested this idea: that reversed remanant magnetism in
rocks might be recording reversed polarity in the planetary field. But the
origin of the earth's field was then unknown; to postulate reversals in a
field of unknown origin was speculative in the extreme.33 In the 1920s,
Japanese geophysicist Motonari Matuyama undertook a detailed study
of magnetism in volcanic rocks in Japan and found a very consistent pat-
tern: recently erupted lavas were consistently polarized in line with the
present field, but reversed rocks were all Pleistocene in age or older
(more than 10,000 years). Matuyama argued for a Pleistocene field
reversal: that sometime around 10,000 years ago, Earth's magnetic field
reversed its polarity. But his work appears to have been largely ignored
by European and American scientists.34 Working in Iceland in the early
1950s, Jan Hospers found similar results: basalt flows there were alter-
nately normally and reversely magnetized.35
The question was taken up by a group in the United States at the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley: geophysics professor John Verhoogen,
his postdoctoral fellow Ian McDougall, and graduate students Allan Cox
22 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
and reversely magnetized rocks. Both Morley and Vine and Matthews
realized that Mason and Raff's zebra stripes might be the tangible evi-
dence needed to convert Hess' geopoetry into geo-fact.
The group best situated to examine the evidence was at Lamont, led
by James Heirtzler. Throughout the 1950s, Ewing had made sure that
magnetometers were towed behind every ship, and that the data col-
lected were catalogued systematically. For some years, Heirtzler and his
students had been studying sea floor remanent magnetism, and they had
inadvertently amassed the data needed to confirm or deny sea floor
spreading. Very quickly they did.37 In 1965, Heirtzler and Xavier Le
Pichon published the first of several articles documenting the magnetic
patterns of the Atlantic Ocean; by 1967-1968, Lamont scientists, includ-
ing Walter Pitman, proved that the sea floor magnetic stripes were con-
sistent with the predictions of the Vine and Matthews model.38 Mean-
while Neil Opdyke, also working at Lamont, showed that marine
sediments recorded the same magnetic events as terrestrial and sea floor
basalts, linking the continents with the oceans.39
Another group at Lamont had focused on bathymetric data—mea-
surements of the depth of the sea floor—primarily in the Atlantic.
These data were highly classified, but Bruce Heezen (1924-1977) and
Marie Tharp had found a creative means around security restrictions: a
physiographic map, essentally an artist's rendition of what the sea floor
would look like drained of water, based on quantitative measurements,
but without actually revealing them. In one glance, a geologist could see
the most important feature: a mountain chain running down the mid-
dle of the Atlantic Ocean floor, crosscut by an enormous series of east-
west bearing fractures that dislocated the ridge all along its length. A
fracture zone also ran down the middle of the mid-ocean ridge, and
Tharp noted that the shape of this central fracture zone suggested it was
a rift, a place where the ocean floor was being pulled apart. Heezen
interpreted the medial rift as evidence in support of the expanding
earth hypothesis, an idea that had been promoted in the mid-1950s by
Australian geologist S. Warren Carey. But other Lamont scientists now
saw it as strong evidence of Hess' theory. The sea floor was split down
the middle, the two sides were moving apart, and the rocks on either
side preserved a symmetrical pattern of the periodic reversals of Earth's
magnetic field.
One more piece in the puzzle would help to bring the whole picture
together: the recognition of transform faults by Canadian geologist J.
Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993). An unusually creative and insightful scientist,
Wilson had been studying Pacific oceanic islands, such as the Hawaiian
World Ocean Floor, Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp, 1977. Copyright Marie Tharp, 1977.
From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics 25
chain, and found that the ages of the islands increased as one moved far-
ther from the East Pacific Rise—a mountainous region on the eastern
side of the Pacific. He realized this could be explained if the rise were a
volcanic center above an upwelling convection current and the islands
were moving progressively from that center by sea floor spreading.40 The
weight of geological data, together with the fit of the continents,
revealed that the earth's surface was "divided into rigid blocks separated
by zones of weakness," and that the "periodic break-up of continents and
then their slow progression to a new pattern may have happened several
times."41 In 1965, Wilson visited Cambridge, where he spoke at length
with Teddy Bullard, Fred Vine, Dan McKenzie, and others interested in
continental mobility, including Harry Hess, who also visited Cambridge
that year.42
Wilson now realized that the fracture zones that displaced the mid-
Atlantic ridge—and similar fracture zones mapped by Scripps scientist
W. H. (Bill) Menard (1920-1986) in the Pacific—provided a clear test of
the idea that the two sides of the ridge were moving apart as solid blocks.
Most people assumed that these fracture zones were strike-slip faults,
because the ridges were displaced across them. But Wilson had a new
idea. Normally, when geologists look at blocks of rock disturbed by an
earthquake, they can determine which direction the land has moved
based on the observable features that are displaced: a fence, a road, a
bridge, or a distinctive rock layer. If the fault is a strike-slip (or transcur-
rent) fault, where two blocks slip alongside each other as they do along
the San Andreas Fault, then geologists look across the fault to see which
way things have moved: if objects have moved to the right, then it's a right-
lateral fault; if they have moved to the left, then it's a left-lateral fault. But
if the mid-ocean ridges were rifts, with the ocean floor splitting apart
along them, then the slip directions on the faults that displaced the
ridges—what Wilson now called transform faults—would be the opposite
of what they would be along conventional strike-slip faults.43
This was a clear and unequivocal test, and developments in seismol-
ogy, hastened by the U.S. government's funding of a world wide standard
seismograph network (WWSSN), had recently made it possible to accu-
rately determine the slip directions on faults. Once again, Lamont sci-
entists were positioned to perform the test. In 1967, seismologist Lynn
Sykes demonstrated that the slip directions on the fracture zones that
cut across the mid-Atlantic ridge were consistent with Wilson's interpre-
tation. The offsets were not transcurrent faults, but, in Wilson's new ter-
minology, transform faults, where a mid-ocean rift was locally trans-
formed into a zone of crustal sliding, and then back again into another
26 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
rifting ridge segment. There was no longer any doubt that the oceans
were splitting apart.
Sykes and co-workers Jack Oliver and Bryan Isacks also examined the
slip directions on earthquakes associated with the edges of ocean basins.
These edges are characterized by zones of deep-focus earthquakes, either
beneath volcanic island chains like the Aleutians on the northern edge
of the Pacific, or beneath continental margin mountain belts such as the
Andes on the eastern edge of the Pacific. Sykes, Oliver, and Isacks found
that the slip directions were consistent with the overlap of one crustal
plate onto another, with the lower one slipping downward; the zones of
deep-focus earthquakes marked the position of the down-going slab.44
A global picture now emerged. Oceans split apart at their centers,
where new ocean floor is created by submarine volcanic eruptions. The
From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics 27
crust then moves laterally across the ocean basins. Ultimately, it collides
with continents along their margins (edges), where the ocean crust sinks
underneath, back into Earth's mantle. As it does, it compresses the con-
tinental margins, generating folded mountain belts and magmas that
rise to the surface as volcanoes, and deep earthquakes as the cold, dense
ocean slab sinks farther and farther back into the earth.45
In 1967-1968, this picture was integrated into a synthetic, quantita-
tive theory. Working independently, Daniel P. McKenzie and Robert L.
Parker at Scripps and Jason Morgan at Princeton established the plate
tectonic model: that crustal motions could be understood as rigid body
rotations on a sphere.46 Building on Morgan's work, Xavier Le Pichon
summarized the relevant data in a map of the world divided into plates,
and calculated their rates of movement on the basis of paleomagnetic
data.47 The result became known as plate tectonics, and it was now the
unifying theory of the earth sciences. By the early 1970s, geologists were
working out its meaning for continental tectonics.48 After nearly a cen-
tury, scientists had finally answered the question of the origin of moun-
tains: they form when plates collide.
This has been a very broad overview. We turn now to how these events
looked at the time, to the people who made them happen.
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