Plate Tectonics: A Theory Surrounding Planet Earth

Plate Tectonics, essentially, is geology's unifying theory that encompasses nearly every feature of planet earth. Throughout history, scientists have been fascinated with this ever changing world, and throughout his entire lifetime, a man named Harry Hess performed many scientific excursions which open the door to further exploration of the Earth and its formation. In 1960, Hess explored the ocean floor and presented his hypothesis of sea floor spreading. Although not necessarily widely accepted and encouraged at the time, this acted as a segue into many other geological debates concerning plate tectonics and the history of this earth[1].

Although Harry Hess supplied the hypothesis for seafloor spreading, Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews are mainly associated with naming seafloor spreading and proposing the Plate Tectonics theory. In 1963, they discovered the opposing polarity bands around the ocean crust. This brought them to the conclusion that the mid ocean ridge is the area of greatest seafloor spreading, which further proved Hess's seafloor spreading theory correct. But the question of why these layers emitted different polarities was not yet answered. Three years later, in 1966, Earth's magnetic reversal was discovered, and came to be known as the Jaramillo Event[2].