Shorts

How We Learned the Continents Move #Shorts

Oct 27, 2026

Pack: 06 - How We Learned the Continents Move

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The ground beneath you is moving, roughly as fast as your fingernails grow, and proving it took half a century.

• 1912: Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift. Critics rejected it because no known force could push continents through the ocean floor (USGS, This Dynamic Earth).
• 1950s: plotting echo-sounding profiles at Columbia's Lamont observatory, Marie Tharp found a rift valley running along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Bruce Heezen first dismissed it as "girl talk" (Lamont-Doherty; Library of Congress).
• 1963: Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews, and independently Lawrence Morley, explained the mirror-image magnetic stripes beside mid-ocean ridges: new crust forms at the ridge and spreads outward (Geological Society of London; NOAA).
• By the late 1960s, plate tectonics had won out; deep-sea drilling in 1968 gave "clinching evidence" for seafloor spreading. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge widens about 2.5 cm a year (USGS).

Did you know the continents are still moving?

Sources

• USGS, This Dynamic Earth
• USGS FAQ, "How fast do tectonic plates move?"
• Marie Tharp in her own words, Columbia Climate School / Lamont-Doherty
• Library of Congress, "Marie Tharp: Mapping the Ocean Floor"
• Geological Society of London, Vine and Matthews
• NOAA Ocean Exploration, Soundings, Sea-Bottom, and Geophysics

Images

• "(Manuscript painting of Heezen-Tharp World ocean floor map by Berann).jpg", Heinrich Berann, Bruce Heezen, Marie Tharp, 1977 (Library of Congress), CC0
• "Alfred Wegener and Rasmus Villumsen - Expedition 1930 - 015.jpg", German Greenland Expedition 1930, public domain
• "Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp working with fathometer record.jpg", AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, 1968, CC0
• "Oceanic.Stripe.Magnetic.Anomalies.Scheme.svg", Chmee2 after USGS, public domain
• "Plates tect2 en.svg", USGS, public domain