Plate Tectonics Theories and Scientists

Wegener wrote of a single supercontinent named Pangaea, meaning “all land." He portrayed the breakup of Pangaea and the movement of continents to their present position in his book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans.

The sonar system is a device that bounces sound waves off underwater objects and then records the echoes of these sound waves. It allowed scientist to map the mid-ocean ridges. In the 1950s scientists used magnetometers to detect magnetic variations on the ocean floor. Age acting rocks helped prove that mid-ocean ridges create new sea floor.

Arthur Holmes was a British geologist. He suggested that thermal convection currents in the mantle was the force moving the continents.

Atlantis was the first ship built specifically for marine biology, geology, and oceanographic. The first Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) research ship. The ship began working in 1931 and retired in 1966.

Hugo Benioff is an American seismologist. He is famous for his work on deep focus earthquakes and how they are associated with subduction zones. He was the first to propose that subduction zones cause deep focus earthquakes.

Wadati was a Japanese seismologist. He wrote several papers. One of his papers proved the evidence of deep earthquakes. He also published the first accurate description of the inclined zone of deep earthquakes.

Du Troit was a South African geologist. He theorized that there were two great landmasses-Laurasia and Gondwana.

They led to the discovery that magnetic strips on the sides of ridges on the ocean floor were the result of sea-floor spreading. This finding was very important to plate tectonics.

He studied mid-ocean ridges. He suggested that a process he called sea-floor spreading continually adds new material to the ocean floor. In sea-floor spreading, the sea floor spreads apart along both sides of a mid-ocean ridge as new crust is added. As a result, the ocean floors carry the continents along with them

Dietz's discovery of the first fracture zone in the pacific in 1952, led to his hypothesis. His hypothesis was that new crustal material is formed at oceanic ridges and spreads outward at a rate of several centimeters per year.