Plate tectonics
Seafloor spreading vindicates Wegener and unifies the earth sciences.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 8 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Magnetic stripes on the ocean floor, symmetrical about mid-ocean ridges and matching the known sequence of geomagnetic reversals, show in the early 1960s that new crust is being created and spreading outward. Combined with earthquake distributions, this yields a model of rigid plates in motion. It explains mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, ocean basins and fossil distributions at once, and geology accepts it within about a decade.