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Shifting ground

Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

Having studied geology in the early 1980s, I have trouble imagining the time, only a decade or so earlier, when plate tectonics--the unifying theory of our planet's inner workings--was not generally accepted. Perhaps that's why I so enjoyed the Web site "This Dynamic Earth" (pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/ dynamic.html). The site's authors W. Jacquelyne Kious and Robert I. Tilling, both at the U.S. Geological Survey, not only present a concise explanation of the theory, they also tell us a bit about the scientists who finally pieced it together.

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The site clarifies the often fuzzy distinction between the older theory of continental drift and its more recent reincarnation, plate tectonics. Under "Historical Perspective," I discovered that the former had been around since 1596, when Flemish mapmaker Abraham Ortelius recorded his belief that the continents had not always been fixed in their present positions. And in 1858, geographer Antonio Snider-Pellegrini showed how the continents had once fit together. Then there was the visionary German scientist Alfred Lothar Wegener, who might have brought us the modern theory of plate tectonics decades before the 1960s had he not perished in 1930 during a trek across the Greenland ice cap.

Under "Plate Tectonics and People," the authors touch on the hazards of living on a restless planet--with its earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions--but they also list benefits, such as fertile soils, rich ore deposits, and geothermal energy. A world without plate tectonics would be poor indeed.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.

Shifting ground

Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

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