Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

The Sea Floor : An Introduction to Marine Geology, PDF eBook

The Sea Floor : An Introduction to Marine Geology PDF

PDF

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

Man's understanding of how this planet is put together and how it evolved has changed radically during the last 30 years.

This great revolution in geology - now usually subsumed under the concept of Plate Tectonics - brought the realization that convection within the Earth is responsible for the origin of today's ocean basins and conti- nents, and that the grand features of the Earth's surface are the product of ongoing large-scale horizontal motions.

Some of these notions were put forward earlier in this century (by A.

Wegener, in 1912, and by A. Holmes, in 1929), but most of the new ideas were an outgrowth of the study of the ocean floor after World War II.

In its impact on the earth sciences, the plate tectonics revolution is comparable to the upheaval wrought by the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), which started the intense discussion on the evolution of the biospere that has recently heated up again.

Darwin drew his inspiration from observations on island life made during the voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836), and his work gave strong impetus to the first global oceanographic expedition, the voyage of HMS Challenger (1872- 1876).

Ever since, oceanographic research has been intimately associ- ated with fundamental advances in the knowledge of Earth.

This should come as no surprise. After all, our planet's surface is mostly ocean.

Information

Other Formats

Information