Lordy, lordy, Walleyes, you are one stupid ass. 20 years and 120 million dollars? Where the hell are you getting those figures from?
And your other figures, from whence do they come?
Walleyes, once again pulling bullshit figures out of his ass.
OK old fraud,
Let me give you a brief tour of the history of Plate Tectonics (this is the difference between an "internet expert" and a true scientist BTW so pay attention). You are partially correct when you state that Plate Tectonics was the result of many decades of research. However,
there was no concerted effort until....well you'll find out when we get there.
The first inkling of Plate Tectonics was published by Alfred Russel Wallace (of whom the now famous Wallace Line first delineated by Wallace in a Linnean Society meeting way back in 1859 is named) in his paper "On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago" which was read at the Royal Geographical Society meeting of 8 June 1863, wherein he explains the theory of zoogeographical division and touches on the mechanism by which it occurs. He was never able to make the leap to subduction zones and the fact that the very island he was living on was moving, but he came close.
The next big jump was of course Alfred Lothar Wegener who attained his PhD in astronomy from the University of Berlin in 1908, but was a true polymath who made great advances in meteorology (he is memorialised in the names of two rare ice crystal halo arcs and by the eponym of the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisen procedure. Which is the mechanism that creates the shapes of raindrops, which he helped to discover. He and his brother also held the World hot air balloon endurance record of 56 hours for quite a while) and of course geology with his 1915 publication The Origin of Continents and Oceans, where he uses the term die Verschiebung der kontainente, which translates as continental displacement. However by the time of his English language translation (1927 or there abouts) it had morphed into continental drift, the term still in use today.
He was of course laughed out of the room by the geological community (a pox on the old school geological scientific community for that attrocity, and the fact he wasn't a geologist was one of the main complaints against him...sound familiar? Oh just admit it you old fraud you!) but he continued to study the effects till his tragic and untimely death at the age of 51 while once again working in Greenland.
He was intrigued by the fit of Africa and South America on a simple Mercator Projection map and his first mention of it is in a letter to his fiance (sorry but I just can't remember the date on that one), however he was far from the first to note the fit of the continents, I believe the first written observation of the apparent connection dates back the great philosopher Francis Bacon in 1620 or so. Then the French Naturalist the Comte de Buffon who included it in his 36 volume Natural History published back in 1778 or 1779. Then in 1858 the noted Catastrophist Antonio Snider-Pellagrini proposed that a single continent had once existed and then broke apart. The Supercontinent of Gondwanaland was first posited by the Austrian Eduard Seuss in 1885 but his oceans were created by sinking and not by creeping, and finally in 1908 an American geologist named Frank Taylor wrote about the possibility of the continents inching towards the equator.
The next piece of the puzzle was provided by the Dutchman Felix Vening Meinasz while employed by the Delft Technical University. He wanted to make the most accurate measurements possible of the Earths gravity and to do so he used two Dutch submarines Her Majesty K II and Her Majesty K XIII made a series of dives around the seas of Java between 1923 and 1927 and he was the first to observe the correlation between the lowering of gravity and the deep Java Trench (and all oceanic trenches for that matter).
Upon hearing of the results of the gravimetric experiments Harry Hess invited Meinesz to Princeton. Hess, Meinesz and two other rising stars of the time Maurice Ewing and Edward Bullard used a boat, called I believe the Barracuda if memory serves, to see if the gravitational anomaly was present in other trench systems. They found that yes indeed it was and Hess and Meinesz actually speculated about the possibility of the trenches being a rift in the crust that allowed the crust to plunge down into the mantle, this was in the mid 1930's. Finally Hess wrote a paper in 1939 that predicted exactly that mechanism.
Now we get to Vine and Matthews or more accurately Keith Runcorn (tragically murdered in 1995 in San Diego I think it was) who was the first to study remenant magnatism. He began his studies in the 1950's
using a whole host of devices (including one sphere made out of 37 pounds of pure gold which he had borrowed from the Royal Mint) and he and his collegues published their paper in 1954.
Then we have Ron Mason, who was on sabbatical at Caltech, who was aware (how we don't know as it was classified) of a US Navy study of underwater magnatism and over morning coffee asked if he could join Project Magnet (as it was officially known) as a supernumery and tow a magnetometer behind the ship as it was proceeding on its mission. Happily the project director agreed and Mason was able to use a ASQ-3A fluxgate magnetometer (modified from a MAD boom that would normally be mounted in a P3 Orion submarine hunting aircraft) that was dragged behind the US Coast Guard vessel Pioneer. It was this project that gifted the world with the magnetic stripes that showed once and for all that yes indeed there had been magnetic reversals over time. This confirmed observations that had been made by a Frenchman named Jean Brunhes and a Japanese geophysicist named Motohari or Motonari (can't remember which, sorry) Matuyama in the 1920's when he demonstrated that there had been a pole reversal in the Pleistocene. After a few years of work it was figured that in the last 76 million years there have been 76 pole reversals, give or take a couple.
OK, NOW we get to Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews, and don't forget their collegue, Lawrence Morley ("internet experts" ALLWAYS seem to forget him!) and their paper in 1963 that placed everything into context. But there were still many problems. The geophysicists had a good theory but they could'nt figure out the actual mechanics of how it all worked. They had the framework but they didn't have the roof up yet.
That was left to the man many consider to be the "father" of plate tectonics and that would be J. Tuzo Wilson (yet another of the masterful scientists the "internet experts" never seem to know about) and his July 24 1965 paper in Nature in which he stated this stunning assertion
"Many geologists have maintained that movements of the Earth's Crust are concentrated in mobile belts, which may take the form of mountains, mid-ocean ridges or major faults...this article suggests that these features are not isolated, that few come to dead ends, but that they are connected into a continuous network of mobile belts about the Earth which divide the surface into several large rigid plates."
His paper then went on to prove his assertions and in doing so described the system of transform faults and how they worked which allowed the plates to move about. I will leave that part out however as it would take a minor book to do so. Wilsons theory was confirmed in short order thanks to the US Navy once again who had placed seismographs around the world to listen for Russian and Chinese nuclear detonations, but which were very easilly modified to detect the slippage of the proposed transform faults and in 1967 they did just that from a lab at Columbia University.
So as you can see the theory of plate tectonics was from the beginning a series of inter-related and inter-disciplinary studies that all came together over a period of about 30 years of actual research..most of which was free or nearly so as the studies were piggybacked on existing projects at little cost.
So there you have a very brief description of how the theory of plate tectonics came about. So be a good little student and check the facts out for yourself.
