Word: vines
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...theory was so unorthodox and tenuous that Hess cautiously called it "geopoetry." It was soon to become geo-fact. After studying Hess's work, a 24-year-old Cambridge University graduate student, Frederick J. Vine, proposed an ingenious test. The iron in the lava from the mid-ocean ridges, he suggested, should be imprinted with the direction of the earth's magnetic field prevailing at the time that the lava cooled off. But patterns in land rocks had already shown that the magnetic field has inexplicably reversed itself as many as 171 times in the past 76 million...
Building the Andes. Vine's recorder provided almost instant playback. Surveying the seabed with sensitive magnetometers towed by an oceanographic vessel, he and other investigators found a zebra-striped pattern of magnetism, its direction repeatedly reversing as their ship moved farther away from the mid-ocean ridges. Seismologists quickly followed with proof of their own. If the sea floor was actually rising from the ridges and dropping back into the earth through the trenches, they reasoned, there should be more seismic shocks in these regions than in surrounding areas. Tests proved them right. The U.S. oceanographic vessel Glomar Challenger...