In a recent post on LinkedIn about the use of magnetics in mineral exploration the term ‘Tilt derivative’ was used. The vast majority of geophysicists working in that area would have passed that by without comment, but it aroused the ire of at least one
The Capricorn expedition of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1951-52 was notable for many things, among them the presence on board of Ron Mason, later the discoverer of the oceanic magnetic stripes, and Helen Raitt, the first woman to take part in an extended US oceanographic cruise. After it was over, Helen wrote a book about the cruise, and sent Ron a copy.
One way of looking at the history of plate tectonics is to identify people without whose intervention general acceptance of the theory might have been delayed by years. Some names emerge that are now almost forgotten. One name in particular springs to mind.
Every so often I trawl the internet in search of gravity information on East and Central Europe, with a particular focus on Croatia and the northern end of the Adriatic. Good maps of those areas have only recently become readily available.
In 2003 the historian Naomi Oreskes published Plate Tectonics: an Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. But what of those who were not insiders? How did it seem to them?
On 12 May 2025 the Earth Science historian Naomi Oreskes delivered a Royal Institution lecture with the title ‘Rethinking the origins of plate tectonics’. The advance publicity suggested that she was about to overturn the whole history of that theory. Was that true?