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Plate tectonics can drift continents and push up mountains, but what drives the plates? This is an insider’s account of how we answered questions posed over two centuries ago and completed geology’s quest for a driving mechanism. Forging through confusing evidence, apparent contradictions and raging debates we arrived at not one but two mechanisms: sinking plates and rising plumes.
Chapter 1. Deep Earth and deep time, big ideas and big egos
Chapter 2. The accidental geophysicist
Chapter 3. A propitious time
Chapter 4. Water, heat, time, mountains
Chapter 5. Yielding rocks
Chapter 6. Vagrant continents
Chapter 7. Like nothing we've seen before
Chapter 8. Novel ideas: plates and plumes
Chapter 9. But what is the driving mechanism?
Chapter 10. Chemistry and egos muscle in
Chapter 11. Making it a science?
Chapter 12. Some clarity: two convection modes, interacting
Chapter 13. Earth's lessons: humility, power and science
Chapter 14. Some chemical clarifying
Chapter 15. Too noble?
Chapter 16. Perspective; Imperfect but better than shouting
Dr Geoff Davies is a retired geophysicist with degrees from Monash University in Australia and the California Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and held several academic positions, concluding at the Australian National University. He has published two scientific books and over 100 scientific papers. His work focuses on mantle dynamics and related topics, as well as the interaction of mantle convection and the thermal evolution of the earth’s interior, which controls the tectonic evolution of the earth.
