Move it: a look at tectonic plates in forward and reverse
This abridged extract from Roy Livermore’s The Tectonic Plates are Moving highlights the four phases of academic acceptance.
Scientific revolutions rarely start with a bang. In 1953, a modest article, barely a page in length, appeared in the weekly science journal Nature, signalling the beginning of modern genetics. And just a decade after Watson and Crick’s brief note, another, equally modest, contribution appeared in the 7 September 1963, issue of the same journal. Sporting the slightly arcane title ‘Magnetic anomalies over ocean ridges’, it heralded an even more profound advance in our understanding of the natural world.
The authors were Fred Vine, a Cambridge University research student, and his supervisor, Drummond Matthews. What they had done, in a nutshell, was to bring together the previously contentious idea that the Earth’s magnetic field occasionally reverses its polarity, with the even more contentious notion that the ocean basins are created by a more-or-less continuous volcanic process known as ‘sea-floor spreading’, in order to explain the shapes of anomalies observed on magnetic profiles measured on ship crossings of a mid-ocean ridge. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound all that exciting. Yet, in so doing, they also showed how such anomalies record not just the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field, but the entire history of the ocean basins.
Most scientists would settle for that, but it was the implications of this discovery that really shook the foundations of the scientific establishment. For, just as reversing the observed expansion of the universe took cosmologists inexorably back to the Big Bang, so rewinding seafloor spreading closed oceans and united the continents in a single ‘supercontinent’, precisely as proposed — and widely dismissed — half a century before. Hence, in direct opposition to the scientific consensus of the time, Vine and Matthews’ conclusions required that continents and oceans must migrate constantly over the surface of the Earth — in other words, they had found the proof of continental drift.
They might well have winged into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, boasting ‘we have discovered the secret of the Earth!’
The ‘Vine–Matthews Hypothesis’, as it became known, was the key that opened the door to a new era in Earth Science. There could be no doubt that a major scientific revolution had begun! Or perhaps there could. For, the following year, Manik Talwani, of the prestigious Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in New York, referred briefly to Vine and Matthews’ hypothesis in his review of marine geophysics, adding ‘It should, however, be pointed out that less startling explanations are also possible for these anomalies.’ Another article published in 1964, this time by Vic Vacquier and Dick Von Herzen of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, reported 14 new magnetic and bathymetric profiles across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Here was the perfect opportunity to put that startling explanation to the test. Yet the only mention of Vine and Mathews’ paper was a passing reference to anomalies observed in the Indian Ocean — the hypothesis itself was entirely ignored and the new magnetic profiles ‘smoothed’ to get rid of those troublesome anomalies on the ridge flanks! Late in 1965, an article on marine magnetic anomalies by Talwani and two other Lamont heavyweights appeared in the prestigious American journal Science, and this time Vine and Matthews’ hypothesis was at least mentioned — before being dismissed with these words that must afterwards have given the trio sleepless nights: ‘The flank anomalies are not axial anomalies at greater depths. Vine and Matthews explain the ridge magnetic anomalies by invoking the “spreading floor hypothesis” of Hess and Dietz. However, we believe that the flankward [sic] diminution in amplitude of the axial anomalies and the differences in character between flank anomalies and axial anomalies make their hypothesis untenable.’ These comments by the eminent professors bring to mind the first, or perhaps the second, of Haldane’s four phases of acceptance of a major scientific discovery:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.
By 1968, the Lamont group had entered the fourth stage, and quickly published a series of papers in which they reinterpreted their magnetic profiles in terms of the Vine–Matthews Hypothesis. No mention was made of their previous opposition to Vine and Matthews’ elegant explanation, or of their own complete failure to grasp its global importance. Instead, readers of these articles might well have been left with the impression that, indeed, the Lamont scientists had ‘always said so’.
Roy Livermore is a marine geophysicist. He spent twenty years with the British Antarctic Survey, mapping and exploring the Southern Ocean. He has participated in thirteen Antarctic research cruises, several as Chief Scientist. His interests include the effects of ocean gateways — specifically the opening of Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica — on global climate and evolution. He received his PhD from the University of East Anglia in 1985, where he worked with Fred Vine on the history of the geomagnetic field. This was followed by a postdoctoral appointment at Cambridge University, where he was involved in making global plate reconstructions. He retired from BAS in 2006.
He is the author of The Tectonic Plates are Moving!
