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8 - Confronting the Continental Drift Conundrum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2020

Simon Mitton
Simon Mitton
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

At the beginning of the twentieth century, conventional geological authority reposed peacefully on the bedrock of uniformitarianism. The received wisdom held that geological processes had changed little across time and that there was no evidence of sudden large-scale changes. Furthermore, the geology of the ocean floor was not considered to be an area of fruitful inquiry. The geological continuity of strata and mountains across deep oceans was explained by the cooling and contracting Earth. Most of the European geologists had accepted the framework of the evolution of Earth’s rocky crust that Europe’s leading geologist, Eduard Suess (1831–1914), had developed from the mid-1880s.

Type
Chapter
Information
From Crust to Core
A Chronicle of Deep Carbon Science
 , pp. 147 - 166
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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