Plate tectonics - Science History Podcast

Plate tectonics

America is getting further away from Europe. This is not a political statement but a geological fact. Just as the Pacific is getting smaller, the Red Sea bigger, the Himalayas are still going up and one day the Horn of Africa will be a large island. This is the theory of plate tectonics, a revolutionary idea in 20th century geology that saw the continents of Earth to be dancing to the music of deep time. A dance of incredible slowness, yet powerful enough to throw up the mountains and pour away the oceans.

Plate tectonics was a genuine scientific revolution. It made geologists and many more besides profoundly re-think what the Earth was, how it worked and how it related to all the things in it.