Monday, January 10, 2022

Plate Tectonic Theory—History of How it was Discovered (Educational)

 https://youtu.be/nCIR0pZuqck [5:56 minutes]

From: IRIS Earthquake Science

34.8K subscribers

57,087 views • Jan 17, 2018 • The theory of plate tectonics represents a fairly young science. The "Father of Plate Tectonics", Alfred Wegener wasn't recognized when he proposed "Continental Drift" in 1912. It would take another 50 years to be accepted. And yet, in the year 1596 the process was already considered by cartographer Abraham Ortelius. This animation gives an overview of the most-recognized proponents (and opponents) of Plate Tectonics Theory up into the 1960's. MORE ANIMATIONS: www.iris.edu/earthquake Narrated by Dr. Wendy Bohon, Informal education specialist for IRIS Written and animated by Jenda Johnson, Earth Sciences Animated. World maps and earthquake locations from IRIS Earthquake Browser Early maps, photos, and images are in public domain Pangea and Ridge magnetics animations from the Educational Multimedia Visualization Center of the Department of Earth Science, U.C. Santa Barbara Animation of the seismic tomography data from EarthScope by Kasrah Hosseini, University of Oxford Music: Far From Home, by Kai Engel, freemusicarchive.org/ Tanz und Nachtanz performed by Capella de la Torre



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A comment on the video:

Geoscience Imaging

Good video, thanks for producing this! I will share this with my structural geology students for discussion. I would suggest some expansions/modifications if there is ever a second edition made in the future. For one, it makes it seem like a lot of those early people were just as relevant as Wegener, which may not have been intentional but I think it comes across that way. Wegener was much more influential on this topic than anyone who came before him by a long shot. There were certainly some who supported Wegener in the 1920s, and even those who disagreed with him, many of them still took him quite seriously. A fuller treatment would be nice in my opinion. I would also like to see mention of the paleomagnetism of the 1950s, as it was known that the apparent polar wander paths for different continents did not match. The work of Benioff on seismic zones in the 1950s also was seminal. J Tuzo Wilson was the first to ever draw a map of Earth's tectonic plates, and his 1965 paper is the most clear crystallization of these ideas at that time. His work was mentioned but its importance could be elaborated. And I would like to have seen more on the critical papers of the late 60s - 70s, such as "tectonics on a sphere" from 1967, and the seminal work of Atwater in 1970, who first brought plate tectonic "on land" and out of the oceans.