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Timeline of the development of tectonophysics (after 1952)

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The evolution of tectonophysics is closely linked to the history of the continental drift and plate tectonics hypotheses. The continental drift/ Airy-Heiskanen isostasy hypothesis had many flaws and scarce data. The fixist/ Pratt-Hayford isostasy, the contracting Earth and the expanding Earth concepts had many flaws as well.

The idea of continents with a permanent location, the geosyncline theory, the Pratt-Hayford isostasy, the extrapolation of the age of the Earth by Lord Kelvin as a black body cooling down, the contracting Earth, the Earth as a solid and crystalline body, is one school of thought. A lithosphere creeping over the asthenosphere is a logical consequence of an Earth with internal heat by radioactivity decay, the Airy-Heiskanen isostasy, thrust faults and Niskanen's mantle viscosity determinations.

Making sense of the puzzle pieces

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Map of the later North Atlantic region after the closing of the Iapetus Ocean and the Caledonian/Acadian orogenies (Wilson 1966). Animals: Trilobites and graptolites.[1][2]
Euramerica in the Devonian (416 to 359 Ma) with Baltica, Avalonia (Cabot Fault, Newfoundland and Great Glen Fault, Scotland; cited in Wilson 1962) and Laurentia (Other parts: Iberian Massif and Armorican terrane).
  • 1953, the Great Global Rift, running along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, was discovered by Bruce Heezen (Lamont Group) (Puzzle pieces: Seismic-refraction and Sonar survey of the rifts). (Ewing & Ewing 1959), (Heezen 1960), (Heezen & Tharp 1961), (Heezen & Tharp 1964), (Heezen & Tharp 1966)
  • World map of earthquake epicenters, oceanic ones mainly (Rothé 1954).
  • 1954–1963: Alfred Rittmann was elected IAV President (IAV at that time) for three periods.
  • 1956, S. K. Runcorn becomes a drifter. (Frankel 1987, p. 221), (Runcorn 1956)
  • S. W. Carey, plate tectonics (Carey 1958). But he believed here in an Expanding Earth.
  • 1958, Henry William Menard notes that most mid-ocean ridges are halfway between the two continental edges ((Menard 1958) cited in (Bullard 1975)).
  • 1959, analysis of Vanguard satellite orbit suggests "large-scale convection currents in the mantle" (O'Keefe, Eckeis & Squires 1959).
  • Seafloor spreading
  • Dott (1961), the Permian tillite at Squantum, Massachusetts, was reclassified as turbidite. It was used as argument by anti-drifters.
  • P. M. S. Blakett (1960), Blakett's former lecturer S. K. Runcorn (1962), Runcorn's former student E. Irving: Paleomagnetism.
  • 1962, S.K. Runcorn applies the Rayleigh's theory of convection: convection occurs if viscosity under the crust is less than 1026-1027 CGS units. (Runcorn 1962b)
  • 1962, Subduction in the Aleutian Islands, Robert R. Coats (USGS). (Coats 1962)
  • Wunderlich, H.G. (March 1962). "50 Jahre Kontinentalverschiebungstheorie – von Wegener bis Runcorn" [50 Years Continental Drift Hypothesis – Wegener to Runcorn]. Geologische Rundschau. 52 (1): 504–513. Bibcode:1962GeoRu..52..504W. doi:10.1007/BF01840095. S2CID 128754334.
    • The uncertainty of the distance between Europe and North America is too great to confirm the continental drift hypothesis. It states wrongly that the lock-and-key form of South America and Africa is less good if the continental shelf is taken into account. Note: the truth is that neither A. Wegener nor C. Schuchert used the east coastline of South America and west coastline of Africa, really; these coastlines don't fit (Bullard 1975).

Plate tectonics

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The "Bullard's Fit" of the Iapetus Ocean suture zone.
Approximate location of Mesoproterozoic (older than 1.3 Ga) cratons in South America and Africa. The São Luís and the Luis Alves cratonic fragments are shown (Brazil), but the Arequipa–Antofalla craton, the Saharan Metacraton and some minor African cratons are not. Other versions describe the Guiana Shield separated from the Amazonian shield by a depression.

Geodynamics

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Euler rotational pole.
Spreading at a mid-ocean ridge (the image has a flaw though, the seafloor gets thicker with age).
     Approximate world distribution of living Cycadales
A distribution map of Gnetophyta colour-coded by genus:
Green – Welwitschia
Blue – Gnetum
Red – Ephedra
Purple – Gnetum and Ephedra range overlap

Overview

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Many concepts had to be changed:

The shifting and evolution of knowledge and concepts, were from:

Profile of the East Swiss Alps (1880, from Northeast to Southwest) by Albert Heim, before he accepted the theory of thrusting. Key: #a Gneiss, schist and so on, #b Jura, #c Cretaceous and #d Eocene; Walensee, Schaechental, Windgaelle and Finsteraarhorn.

Actually, there were two main "schools of thought" that pushed plate tectonics forward:

Wegener's continental drift hypotheses is a logical consequence of: the theory of thrusting (alpine geology), the isostasy, the continents forms resulting from the supercontinent Gondwana break up, the past and present-day life forms on both sides of the Gondwana continent margins, and the Permo-Carboniferous moraine deposits in South Gondwana.

Graphics

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Plate tectonics map, Digital Tectonic Activity Map[14]
Global plate tectonic movement[15]

See also

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References

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Notes

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  1. ^ Windley 1996.
  2. ^ Ziegler 1990.
  3. ^ Hurley et al. 1966.
  4. ^ Hurley et al. 1967.
  5. ^ McPhee 1998.
  6. ^ Bill Bonini; Laurie Wanat, eds. (Fall 2003). "Jason Morgan Retires" (PDF). The Smilodon: The Princeton Geosciences Newsletter. 44 (2). Fortuitously, he was assigned as well an office that he shared for two years with Fred Vine,... This insight was fundamental to the revolutionary theory then developing, and sharing that office with Fred Vine drew Morgan into the subject — as he puts it — "with a bang." A paper written by H.W. Menard caused him to begin musing on his own about great faults and fracture zones, and how they might relate to theorems on the geometry of spheres Passages about W. Jason Morgan from McPhee, John (1998) Annals of the Former World, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
  7. ^ Poinar GO, Danforth BN (October 2006). "A fossil bee from Early Cretaceous Burmese amber" (PDF). Science. 314 (5799): 614. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.627.551. doi:10.1126/science.1134103. PMID 17068254. S2CID 28047407. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-12-04.
  8. ^ Dave Mosher (December 26, 2007). "Modern beetles predate dinosaurs". Live Science. Retrieved June 24, 2010.
  9. ^ Wiegmann, Brian M.; Trautwein, Michelle D.; Winkler, Isaac S.; Barr, Norman B.; Kim, Jung-Wook; Lambkin, Christine; Bertone, Matthew A.; Cassel; Bayless, Brian K.; Heimberg, Alysha M.; Wheeler, Benjamin M.; Peterson, Kevin J.; Pape, Thomas; Sinclair, Bradley J.; Skevington, Jeffrey H.; Blagoderov, Vladimir; Caravas, Jason; Kutty, Sujatha Narayanan; Schmidt-Ott, Urs; Kampmeier, Gail E.; Thompson, F. Christian; Grimaldi, David A.; Beckenbach, Andrew T.; Courtney, Gregory W.; Friedrich, Markus; Meier, Rudolf; Yeates, David K. (2011). "Episodic radiations in the fly tree of life". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (14): 5690–5695. Bibcode:2011PNAS..108.5690W. doi:10.1073/pnas.1012675108. PMC 3078341. PMID 21402926.
  10. ^ Araki et al. 2005.
  11. ^ Scotese, Christopher. "The Paleomap Project".
  12. ^ a b "Center for Geodynamics, Geological Survey of Norway".
  13. ^ a b "EarthByte Group, University of Sydney". Archived from the original on 2012-06-28.
  14. ^ The Digital Tectonic Activity Map (DTAM) was produced by Paul Lowman and colleagues at NASA GSFC, 1998.
  15. ^ NASA/JPL Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine, courtesy of Michael B. Heflin, 2007.9. See Bird (2003) and Dr. Ron Blakey Archived 2012-08-07 at the Wayback Machine, Northern Arizona University.

Cited books

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  • Bacon, Francis (1620). s:en:Novum Organum. Translated by Wood, Devey, Spedding, et al. England.
  • P.M.S. Blackett, E.C. Bullard and S.K. Runcorn (ed). A Symposium on Continental Drift, held on 28 October 1965. pp. 323:
  • Carey, S. W. (1958). "The tectonic approach to continental drift". In Carey, S. W. (ed.). Continental Drift—A symposium, held in March 1956. Hobart: Univ. of Tasmania. pp. 177–363. Expanding Earth from pp. 311–349.
  • Coats, Robert R. (1962). "Magma type and crustal structure in the Aleutian arc". The Crust of the Pacific Basin. American Geophysical Union Monograph. Vol. 6. pp. 92–109.
  • Cowen, R.; Lipps, J.H., eds. (1975). Controversies in the Earth sciences. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co. pp. 439. ISBN 978-0-8299-0044-6.
  • Dana, James Dwight (1863). Manual of Geology: Treating of the Principles of the Science with Special Reference to American Geological History. Bliss. p. 805.
  • Flint, R. F. (1947). Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch. New York: John Wiley and Sons. p. 589. ISBN 978-1-4437-2173-8.
  • Frankel, H. (1987). "The Continental Drift Debate". In H.T. Engelhardt Jr; A.L. Caplan (eds.). Scientific Controversies: Case Solutions in the resolution and closure of disputes in science and technology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-27560-6.
  • W.A.J.M. van Waterschoot van der Gracht; Bailey Willis; Rollin T. Chamberlin; John Joly; G.A.F. Molengraaff; J.W. Gregory; Alfred Wegener; Charles Schuchert; Chester R. Longwell; Frank Bursley Taylor; William Bowie; David White; Joseph T. Singewald, Jr.; Edward W. Berry (1928). W.A.J.M. van Waterschoot van der Gracht (ed.). Theory of Continental Drift: a symposium on the origin and movement of land masses both intercontinental and intracontinental as proposed by Alfred Wegener, A Symposium of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG, 1926). Tulsa, OK. p. 240.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  • Le Grand, H. E. (1990). "Is one picture worth a thousand experiments?". In Le Grand, H. E. (ed.). Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer. pp. 241–270.
  • Hallam, A. (1983). Great Geological Controversies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. x+182. ISBN 978-0-19-854430-2.
  • Hellman, Hal (1998a). "Lord Kelvin versus Geologists and Biologists – The Age of the Earth". Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever. New York: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 105–120. ISBN 978-0-471-35066-8.
  • Hellman, Hal (1998b). "Wegener versus Everybody – Continental Drift". Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever. New York: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 141–158. ISBN 978-0-471-35066-8.
  • Hess, H. H. (November 1962). "History of Ocean Basins" (PDF). In A. E. J. Engel; Harold L. James; B. F. Leonard (eds.). Petrologic studies: a volume to honor of A. F. Buddington. Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America. pp. 599–620.
  • Holmes, Arthur (1944). Principles of Physical Geology (1 ed.). Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons. ISBN 978-0-17-448020-4.
  • Holmes, Arthur (1929b). The Origin of Continents and Oceans.
  • Hopkins, Evan (1844). On the connection of geology with terrestrial magnetism. R. Taylor. p. 129.
  • Jeffreys, H. (1924). The Earth – its Origin, History and Physical Constitution (1 ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 429.
    • Jeffreys, H. (1952). The Earth – its Origin, History and Physical Constitution (3 ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 574. ISBN 978-0-521-20648-8.
  • Kay, Marshall, ed. (1969). North Atlantic: geology and continental drift, a symposium. Tulsa, OK: American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG).
  • Keary, P; Vine, F. J. (1990). Global Tectonics. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications. pp. 302.
  • Kious, W. Jacquelyne; Tilling, Robert I. (February 2001) [1996]. "Historical perspective". This Dynamic Earth: the Story of Plate Tectonics (Online ed.). U.S. Geological Survey. ISBN 978-0-16-048220-5. Retrieved 2008-01-29. Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus... suggested that the Americas were 'torn away from Europe and Africa... by earthquakes and floods... The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].'
  • Krill, Allan (2011). Fixists vs. Mobilists: In the Geology Contest of The Century, 1844–1969. ISBN 978-82-998389-1-7.
  • Lilienthal, T. (1756). Die Gute Sache der Göttlichen Offenbarung. Königsberg: Hartung. This is also likely owing to the fact that the coasts of certain lands, situated opposite each other though separated by sea, have a corresponding shape, so that they would be congruent with one another were they to stand side by side; for example, the southern part of America and Africa. For this reason one supposes that perhaps both of these continents were previously attached to each other, either directly, or through the sunken island of Atlantis;...
  • Lyell, Charles (1875). Principles of Geology (12th ed.).
  • Machamer, Peter; Pera, Marcella; Baltas, Aristides, eds. (2000). Scientific Controversies. Oxford University Press. pp. 278. ISBN 978-0-19-511987-9. Wegener pp. 72–75.
  • Marvin, Ursula B. (1973). Continental Drift: The Evolution of a Concept ((Dissertation)). Smithsonian Institution Press. p. 239. ISBN 978-0-87474-129-2.
  • McPhee, John (1998). Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-10520-4.
  • Oreskes, Naomi (1999). The rejection of continental drift: theory and method in American earth science. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511733-2.
  • Naomi Oreskes; Homer Le Grand, eds. (December 2001). Plate Tectonics: An Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. Westview Press. p. 448. ISBN 978-0-8133-3981-8.
  • Ortelius, Abraham (1596). Thesaurus Geographicus (3 ed.). Antwerp: Plantin. The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents (Europe, Africa and Americas)]
  • Pepper, John Henry (1861). The Playbook of Metals. Routledge, Warne, and Routledge. pp. 502.
  • Phinney, R. A. (1968). The History of the Earth's Crust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. p. 244.
  • Revelle, R. R. (1944). Marine bottom samples collected in the Pacific Ocean by the Carnegie on its Seventh Cruise. Pub. 556, Part 1. Washington: Carnegie Inst.
  • Runcorn, S. K., ed. (1962b). Continental Drift. New York and London: Academic Press. p. 338.
  • Snider-Pellegrini, Antonio (1858). La Création et ses mystères dévoilés. Paris: Frank and Dentu.
  • Stampfli, G.M.; Borel, G.D. (2004). "The TRANSMED Transects in Space and Time: Constraints on the Paleotectonic Evolution of the Mediterranean Domain". In Cavazza W.; Roure F.; Spakman W.; Stampfli G.M.; Ziegler P (eds.). The TRANSMED Atlas: the Mediterranean Region from Crust to Mantle. Springer Verlag. ISBN 978-3-540-22181-4.
  • Suess, E. (1875). Die Entstehung der Alpen [The Origin of the Alps]. W. Braumüller. A mass movement, more or less horizontal and progressive, should be the cause underlying the formation of our mountain systems.
  • Suess, Eduard (1885-08-19). Das Antlitz der Erde [The Face of the Earth]. Translated by Sollas, H.B.C. Vienna: F. Tempsky.
  • Sullivan, Walter (1991). Continents in Motion: The New Earth Debate (1 ed.). American Inst. of Physics. p. 425. ISBN 978-0-88318-703-6.
  • du Toit, Alexander (1937). Our wandering continents: an hypothesis of continental drifting. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. ISBN 978-0-8371-5982-9.
  • Umbgrove, J.H.F. (1947). The Pulse of the Earth (2 ed.). The Hague, NL: Martinus Nyhoff. p. 359.
  • Vening Meinesz, F.A. (1948). Gravity expeditions at sea 1923–1938. Vol. IV. Complete results with isostatic reduction, interpretation on the results. Delft: Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie 9. p. 233. ISBN 978-90-6132-015-9. Archived from the original on 2011-07-22.
  • Wallace, Alfred Russel (2007). Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection With Some of Its Applications. Cosimo, Inc. p. 516. ISBN 978-1-60206-453-9.
  • Wegener, A. (1929). Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (in German) (4 ed.). Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn Akt. Ges. ISBN 978-3-443-01056-0.
    • Wegener, A. (1966) [1929]. The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Courier Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0-486-61708-4.
  • Windley, B.F. (1996). The Evolving Continents (3 ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-91739-7.
  • Ziegler, P.A. (1990). Geological Atlas of Western and Central Europe (2 ed.). Bath: Shell Internationale Petroleum Maatschappij BV, Geological Society Publishing House. p. 239. ISBN 978-90-6644-125-5.

Cited articles

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Further reading

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