Introduction

For those who entered the earth sciences in the mid-1960s or earlier, the advent of Plate Tectonics was either an extraordinarily upsetting encounter with a seemingly non-geological science or a marvelous revelation that rearranged a couple of centuries of field observations into a high degree of unanticipated coherence. Suddenly, a profound simplicity emerged from apparent complexity — a simplicity that was so clear and transparent that the initial reaction of many was disbelief Indeed, skeptics viewed the New Global Tectonics as a kind of bogus religious experience promulgated by carpet-bagging geophysicists and a few scalawag geologists. The disbelievers for the most part decided to ignore the new “paradigm”; treating Plate Tectonics in the same way that contemporary science philosophers treated Kuhn’s inferred structure of scientific revolutions, of which Plate Tectonics became the latest paradigm.