Preface: History and Memory -- The Historical Background -- From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics -- The Early Work: From Paleomagnetism to Sea Floor Spreading -- Stripes on the Sea Floor -- Reversals of Fortune -- The Zebra Pattern -- On Board the Eltanin-19 -- The Birth of Plate Tectonics -- Heat Flow and Seismology -- How Mobile is the Earth? -- Heat Flow Under the Oceans -- Locating Earthquakes and Plate Boundaries -- Earthquake Seismology in the Plate Tectonics Revolution -- The Plate Model -- Plate Tectonics: A Surprising Way to Start a Scientific Career -- When Plates Were Paving Stones -- My Conversion to Plate Tectonics -- From the Oceans to the Continents -- Plate Tectonics and Geology, 1965 to Today -- When the Plate Tectonic Revolution Met Western North America -- The Coming of Plate Tectonics to the Pacific Rim -- From Plate Tectonics to Continental Tectonics An Evolving Perspective of Important Research, from a Graduate Student to an Established Curmudgeon -- Epilogue: Continents Really Do Move -- Plate Tectonics: A Martian View
Naomi Oreskes, Ph.D. Stanford, is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.
When the fundamentals of plate tectonics are explained in any basic geology textbook, it is easy to forget that in the 1960s it was a revolutionary idea that completely transformed earth science. "As the far-reaching success of these ideas became clear, we all rapidly became famous," writes Dan McKenzie, then a geophysics graduate student at Cambridge who launched his academic career on the new discoveries. McKenzie is one of 17 scientists invited to contribute personal memories of those early days to this collection of essays, edited by Oreskes (history, Univ. of California, San Diego). This is an important historical record, and it is fascinating to read how, once the data became available, the details of sea-floor spreading, mid-oceanic ridges, and subduction zones began to form a complete and convincing model. Nonetheless, this is largely an academic history of research and conferences, computer models, and the race to publish. For an overview of how plate tectonics works, academic libraries should buy a textbook such as Kent C. Condie's Plate Tectonics and Crustal Evolution (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997. 4th ed.), and school libraries should consider Helen Roney Sattler and Giulio Maestro's Our Patchwork Planet (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1995). Amy Brunvand, Univ. of Utah Lib., Salt Lake City Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Readers who went to school before the late 1960s will probably remember that their science teachers couldn't explain why South America and Africa seemed to fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. It was not until 1968 that the theory of plate tectonics was formulated and quickly accepted by scientists around the world. This collection of 18 essays is written by the researchers (such as Frederick J. Vine and Lawrence Morley) who made the discoveries that established the phenomenon of plate tectonics. While the idea of "continental drift" had been proposed as early as 1596 and reappeared at various times throughout history, scientists had always rejected it. Then in the late 1950s and '60s, geologists discovered great rifts in the undersea mountain ranges that girdle the ocean, as well as regular patterns of alternating magnetic polarities in the ocean floor. These and other findings confirmed continental drift and explained the existence of volcanic islands and even earthquakes en masse. Readers with little or no background in geology will be able to follow these well-written and generally jargon-free personal accounts, but the book will appeal most to hard-core science buffs and budding geophysicists. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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