"The Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, was in chaos when 24-year-old Tanya Atwater arrived to pursue her graduate studies. It was January 1967, and a buzz of frenetic energy filled the air. Long rolls of paper printed with squiggles of magnetic data spooled down the hallways, retrieved from odd corners where they had lain covered in dust."
"A few weeks earlier, a Cambridge geophysicist named Fred Vine had visited Scripps to explain a theory so new it didn't yet have a name. Some called it the Vine-Matthews Hypothesis; others referred to it as seafloor spreading. It was a critical advancement on the old, long-discredited notion of continental drift. The new theory would come to be known as plate tectonics."
"Her first class was marine geology. The professor didn't bother with the syllabus. Chalk flew over the blackboard as he dove right into this "wonderful new idea," which had transformed the study of the oceans and would, in time, upend the story of the continents and how they came to be. No point in opening the textbooks; they were suddenly out of date."
Tanya Atwater arrived at Scripps in January 1967 amid chaotic excitement and visible magnetic data streaming through the halls. A Cambridge geophysicist, Fred Vine, introduced a nascent theory called the Vine-Matthews Hypothesis or seafloor spreading that overturned long-held fixist beliefs and led to plate tectonics. Atwater stood out as a young woman with a geophysics degree and a talent for big-picture thinking. Marine geology teaching shifted immediately as textbooks became obsolete. Worldwide similarities in rock layers and fossils provided additional evidence that continents had moved relative to one another.
Read at High Country News
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