Prologue: The Day the Earth Moved

1. In the Beginning

2. Continents Adrift?

3. Sources of Friction

4. Permanentist Foundations

5. Tuzo’s War

6. A Geologist in a Strange Land

7. Seismic Shift

8. The New World of Plate Tectonics

9. An Unlikely Revolutionary

In the Beginning

"The field of tectonics is no place for a prim individual who likes everything orderly and settled and has a horror of loose ends."

-Chester Longwell, 1930

From classical times until the mid-1900s, geology was largely a practical science. Geologists spent most of their efforts searching for metals, oil, gas, and coal – strategic resources that won wars and powered empires, raised living standards, and built sophisticated economies. As taught to students in universities, geology was largely an applied “inventory science” emphasizing the collection and classification of rocks, minerals, and fossils, and disparagingly described by other scientists as little more than “stamp collecting.” But with the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin posed certain questions that only geologists could answer: How old was the planet and how had it evolved? What was the origin of its continents and oceans? Geology began attracting new attention.

There were those such as James Dwight Dana, the first ever professor of geology in any North American university, who in the early 1870s proposed that continents were evidence of an all-powerful “divine plan” made by a Creator who had established the broad outlines of today’s world fixed in place over hundreds of millions of years.

Continents and oceans were immutable, and academic careers and reputations were made by methodically reconstructing snapshots of the geography of ancient continents as shallow seas waxed and waned across their surfaces, and as organisms migrated along land bridges across oceans from one permanently anchored land mass to another. These “palaeogeographic” maps were treated reverentially as icons framing the official history of the planet and dutifully reproduced in textbooks.

The guardians of this geological orthodoxy (or “permanentists” as they came to be known) were a tight-knit group: they met frequently at conferences, they oversaw who was appointed in their university departments and who was promoted, and they instructed the next generation in the permanent nature of the Earth. They saw off outsiders who had other ideas about how the planet might have evolved by influencing what was published in scientific journals (many of which they had founded and continued to run). They quarantined the impressionable minds of students from dangerous foreign ideas emerging from Europe that proposed the continents were on the move. Detailed calculations by eminent physicists had pronounced that such mobility was impossible: Earth’s interior was far too rigid.