The discovery of how the sea floor spreads is more earth-shaking than the revelation of DNA, yet those responsible are forgotten, says Anna Grayson.
Forty years ago this month, a paper appeared in the journal Nature that radically changed the way we view this planet and its resources. Its authors, Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews, did for the Earth sciences what Crick and Watson did for biology and Einstein did for physics, and new areas of scientific development are still emerging as a result.
Yet both men are largely forgotten and unrecognised. What Vine and Matthews did was to provide proof that continents drift across the surface of the globe. This understanding profoundly affects the way we use the planet today — it directs the way we prospect for resources such as oil and minerals; it has enabled us to predict most volcanic eruptions and to understand patterns of earthquakes and long-term global climate changes.
Despite the significance of their work, neither man received great honour, nor fame. Matthews died in 1997, and at least two volumes of scientific biography list Vine as deceased, which he is not. He lives quietly and peacefully in Norwich — no knighthood, no Nobel prize, and certainly not a household name.
The idea of continental drift was first proposed in a serious way by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener in 1915. People had noticed the neat jigsaw-like fit between South America and Africa, but Wegener found actual fossil evidence that the two continents were once joined. No one took him seriously; principally because Wegener was unable to explain how whole continents could move even an inch, let alone dance to the music of time around the globe.
The Scottish geologist Arthur Holmes and the American Harry Hess continued to investigate continental movement, but neither man could find evidence to prove it. Vine had been fascinated by the apparent fit of the continents since the age of 14, and as a graduate student at Cambridge was assigned a project analysing one of the new magnetic surveys of the ocean floor. He found what he describes as “parallel zebra stripes of normal and reversed magnetism” around the Carlsberg mid-ocean ridge.
Most significantly, these stripes were symmetrical on either side of the ridge crests. There had to be a reason for this. The young Vine and his supervisor Matthews proposed that the magnetic stripes were caused by new ocean floor being formed as molten rock rose at the mid-ocean ridges and spread to each side of the ridge.
As the molten rock solidified, it became weakly magnetised, parallel to the Earth’s magnetic field. It was just becoming recognised in the early ‘60s that the Earth’s magnetic field flips every so often, with magnetic north becoming a magnetic south pole and vice versa. These flips in the magnetic field were being recorded in the new sea floor. It was like a giant tape recording of the ocean floor’s history. As new sea floor was made, it pushed the last lot aside, widening the ocean and in turn pushing the continents on either side further apart.
In other words, they had discovered the mechanism driving the drifting continents that was missing from Wegener’s work.
“The biggest surprise of my career was that confirmation came in two to three years from other parts of the ocean — I thought it would take decades’’, said Vine.
The scales fell from geologists’ eyes and there was a realisation that mountains are formed when two plates collide, and that most volcanoes and earthquakes occur on the edges of these plates.
Starting in 1970, a whole new generation of geologists grew up realising that the location of oil and minerals was dependent on past movements of the continents. In a get-rich-quick nutshell, you are more likely to find oil where continents have been stretched and split, and gold where continents have collided.
No one seems to have calculated the monetary benefit to the world — or even just to Britain — of the understanding triggered by Vine and Matthews, but Mick Oates, a development geologist with the BG Group (British Gas) reckons it “must run into billions”.
Vine is laid-back about his lack of recognition, as is the learned body that deals with such things, the Geological Society of London. ``Overall recognition in the form of accolades or Nobel prizes has been limited,’’ admits its president, Sir Mark Moody Stuart. “(But) there are few geologists who do not know what Vine and Matthews did, and to a scientist that in itself is no small recognition.’’
Professor Bob Spicer, of Britain’s Open University, disagrees: “It could be argued that this work is more important than DNA because it’s so all-embracing,’’ he says, and adds that everybody - not just the geological world - needs to understand a bit about the workings of the planet we live on: ``It’s our only home and we need to know how it works to look after it. The guy needs a knighthood.''
- The Daily Telegraph
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