Atlantis Online
March 28, 2024, 06:28:17 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Underwater caves off Yucatan yield three old skeletons—remains date to 11,000 B.C.
http://www.edgarcayce.org/am/11,000b.c.yucata.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

Plate tectonics

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Plate tectonics  (Read 2285 times)
0 Members and 102 Guests are viewing this topic.
Rebecca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 5201



« on: May 16, 2007, 06:52:35 am »



The tectonic plates of the world were mapped in the second half of the 20th century.

Plate tectonic theory arose out of the hypothesis of continental drift first proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912 and expanded in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans that said in part that all the continents once been together in a single land mass that had drifted apart. But it was not until the mechanic of seafloor spreading (first articulated by Robert S. Dietz, but Harry Hess is usually given credit (see below)) in the early 1960s that the theory actually became accepted by the scientific community.

Following the recognition of magnetic anomalies defined by symmetric, parallel stripes of similar magnetization on the seafloor on either side of a mid-ocean ridge, plate tectonics quickly became broadly accepted. Simultaneous advances in early seismic imaging techniques in and around Wadati-Benioff zones collectively with numerous other geologic observations soon solidified plate tectonics as a theory with extraordinary explanatory and predictive power.

Study of the deep ocean floor was critical to development of the theory; the field of deep sea marine geology accelerated in the 1960s. Correspondingly, plate tectonic theory was developed during the late 1960s and has since been essentially universally accepted by scientists throughout all geoscientific disciplines. The theory has revolutionized the Earth sciences because of its unifying and explanatory power for diverse geological phenomena.

Report Spam   Logged


Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy