How Plate Tectonics was Discovered 

I was a graduate student at her Fairbanks University of Alaska back in 1965-7 studying the basalts in the central Alaska region. On area of my studies found a mixture of basalts, prettified wood, deep sea shells, all mixed together. When I wrote my thesis I stated that this could be a area of collision between an island arc and the Brooks Range. The department professors found my ideas as crazy. I was not allowed to put my speculation in my thesis. Now we know that Alaska is made up of a number of land units that have collided against the Brooks range to make much of the land mass of Alaska. At the time plate tectonics was not believed by many of the professors and the definitive proof was a few years later provided that revolutionized the field of geology. This video summarizes our knowledge as of the period around 1970. It is an old video but still quite accurate. We now have an even more detailed understanding of plate tectonics. Much of the information provided here was collected to support the “Cold War”. The knowledge of the earth’s surface was critical at the time.

53 years ago they were able to put together such a good description of a key geological principle that some religious fundamentalists still manage to deny.

Not sure how many people are aware that the narrator, Chris Chataway, was a world class athlete and in 1954 held the world record for the 5000m. He was also, along with Chris Brasher, one of the pacemakers when Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile. When I first attended grammar school in 1963 he was one of the school governors and spoke at that years Founders Day.

Dr Maurice Brown from the 40:00 minutes mark, it's fascinating to hear him describe in 1970 more or less what would happen at Mt St Helens a mere ten years later.

This documentary is now an important scientific historical document. For younger people learning about "continental drift", now called plate tectonics it is an ideal introduction to the topic. As a 76 year old interested person I have lived through all this changing perspective, from a puzzle to a fact. Such scientists as feature in this documentary will all be dead by now, I assume, but they should honoured as heroes in scientific history. Also educative to our youngsters that you don't need super-computers or video screens to accomplish scientific investigation, just an open mind and a willingness to think outside the box and a lot of tracing paper. Also loved the wobbly sound track - Stravinsky's Firebird Suite never sounded more mysterious. Christopher Chataway, narrator, another blast from the past, world class runner, who paced Roger Bannister for the first sub-four minute mile, later Tory minister, business man and TV announcer. As was said, all the geology books needed total rewriting.

Thank you for reviving this wonderfully informative educational movie. EVERYONE needs to see it! I learned about plate tectonics and continental drift in 1972 as I started my career in geology. Very cool stuff then and now. It's very sad that 50 years later I am still seeing (and hearing) people talk about things like dinosaurs and palm trees in far northern latitudes as if they are examples of past global climate change without ever considering the fact that the continents themselves have moved in the last 200 million years. People, please always consider the 4th Dimension (Time) when thinking or talking about planet Earth. Yes, palm trees may have grown on the land we now call Alaska, BUT that land was not at the same latitude then as it is today. In fact, just yesterday (Dec 27, 2023) I heard well-meaning people on a podcast falling all over themselves to explain how T-Rex could have survived in the low sunlight near the Arctic Circle (because that's where their fossil bones were found). Yikes! My ears nearly melted! 😜

I remember finding an old geology book at school that had 'land bridges' connecting the continents to explain how similar animals and plants were found in different places. These land bridges had then disappeared - perhaps taking Atlantis with them. Then we heard about continental drift ...

Seventeenth century Danish Catholic bishop (he converted to Catholicism and moved to Italy) Nicholas Steno should be given a lot of credit for being one of the quite early scientists that realized that the earth had been subject to a lot of movements and cataclysms - the fossil of a fish was discovered in the mountains of Tuscany and from the dentition Steno was able to demonstrate that this was the same species of fish being caught on the Tuscan coast by local fishermen -he then concluded that the Tuscan mountains had once been under the sea and some sort of cataclysmic event had raised the sea bed up. He was an absolute pioneer in the development of the science of stratigraphy which examines the different layers of the earth - a discovery that was an essential prelude to the formulation of the theory of continental drift.

We actually watched this film in fall of 1980 in my igneous petrology class at the university of Texas at Austin. Dr. Dan Barker was the professor. PS - the sound track was in much better shape back then!😊

It breaks my heart that 'Horizon' faded into irrelevance when it went all 'green' and 'touchy-feely'. This was an awesome program which showed the BBC and public service broadcasting at its very best. The episodes on Silicon-chips in the early 70s, and the one about computers and the prospect for home computers were the harbingers of a technological and societal tsunami. Horizon's programs on High energy Physics, Astronomy and most memorably 'vision and colour perception' were the reason I took sciences at VIth Form - a decision that I have never regretted for an instant. Please accept my lifetime of thanks, anyone who was involved in the 1970s/1980s Horizon.

I’m at retirement age now. Couple of decades ago, I overheard a little girl talking to her dad about Plate tectonics. I’d never heard the phrase before, and looked it up when I got home. I still remember my amazement that such a thing existed, that I’d somehow missed knowing about it, and that a little child could know so much more than what I had always imagined was a well read adult, lol.

I was in the second grade in 1970. Throughout the years I remember how excited my geography teachers were about the evidence of plate tectonics. I always liked geography and did well in it, I think, due to the exuberance of curious teachers.

I’m a 71 yr old American woman, Midwest. Our teacher talked about “continental drift” in grade school, so it had to be 1962 or earlier. We all looked at the globe and it certainly looked possible to us kids that our hemisphere and Africa/Europe could have fit together at some point.

Vintage documentaries are something else ❤ true passion for the topics, simple words, no special effects of the images, calm and clarity in speaking. What emerges is just the will of sharing knowledge, to build a better humankind, and not the will to impress people for getting attention and money, like it's now.

SO HAPPY TO SEE THIS! As a young girl growing up in the hills of western Oregon in 1959, I attended what became my final year at an 8-grades, 2-room, country school. (We were "consolidated into the city schools" after that year.) I was 8.5 years old, then, and just starting 4th grade. (I had skipped 2nd grade, so was young for the grade.) While I was idly looking at the classroom's World Globe, rotating it slowly, I noticed that the continents and large islands of the world globe _MIGHT_ be able to do something mighty peculiar... _IF!!!_ *_IF_* you were able to "magically" slide the continents & large islands around, like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, they would pretty much all fit back together into a much larger land mass. *HOW **_WONDERFUL,_** & what a **_MARVELOUS REVELATION_* to my young mind - *_THIS_** WAS **_EXCITING!_* I very quickly told my teacher, Mrs. Hassler, trying to _SHOW_ her what I'd discovered, but she not only didn't agree with my "findings," not one little bit, *SHE **_WOULDN'T EVEN LOOK!_* Mrs. Hassler insisted that *"GOD* made the world - *_EXACTLY AS IT IS,_* - AND *IT HASN'T CHANGED **_ANY_** IN OVER THIRTY-FIVE HUNDRED YEARS - **_NOT ONE LITTLE BIT_** - SINCE IT WAS MADE!"* *_WHOA,_*_ THAT_ was rather surprising. Up until that moment, I'd had quite a lot of respect for my teacher, but _THAT RESPECT_ melted away very fast! She had always come across as sensible & level-headed, but her "knee-jerk" (and _VERY_ religious) reaction to a little girl's "world view enthusiasm" was startling! She wouldn't even look... 😕 I'm glad my "childish observations" were proven correct, and in not too many more years, either. It had appeared so very, _VERY,_ obvious to my young brain that those "jigsaw puzzle pieces" could be fitted back together - NEATLY! - and that was *FULLY AS OBVIOUS* _AS THAT_ *THE EARTH IS A GLOBE!* (But that's a different issue, now, *isn't it?!)* 👍😊👋 Edit x2: punctuation, only

Simple lo tech teaching with very good diction, no histrionics or gasping of breath in anticipation. A pleasant way to learn.....as I at 75 remember it. And most important, no recap of the last section every 10 minutes to allow for adverts insertion and visiting channel surfers.....well done finding this excellent footage.

This is so much better than a heavy cgi explanation. Of course it has the benefit of interviewing the scientists that actually made the discoveries, but still, so well done.

Look up Marie Tharp, her work was the main reason Continental drift as proposed by Wegner in 1911 was accepted in the 60s.

Two of the young researchers in the film I found, Dan McKenzie these days emeritus in Cambridge, and Terry Tullis, then UCLA, now emeritus at Brown. It must put your professional life in an interesting perspective being able to see a young version of yourself in a prgram like this.

3:22 You know this documentaries old when to prove a point, the fellas would lift a leg and place it on whatever stand was nearby

I was a student at Newcastle University (UK) in the 70's and occasionally Prof Runcorn lectured but mainly we got a stand-in. It was a great time. We had a display of moon rocks in the foyer of the Physics building and an electro-mechanical device that demonstrated the principle by which the earth's magnetic field flipped. Sadly I learned a few years ago he died after being attacked while returning to his apartment in Manchester.

When I took geology in 1960 at the University of Texas I recall asking the professor about the apparent fit of the continents that implied they drifted apart. He explained that had often been posited in the past but had been disproven by more modern scientific analysis. A few years later things changed...... a lot.

I can remember reading an article in Scientific American, in 1964 about this. At the time, the theory of "Continental Drift" was just a strong theory.

Excellent documentary. So well explained. Now I want to see the follow-up 50 years later.

I did some safety inspections onboard the Glomar Challenger (minute 21 of video) around 1984. What an amazing drill-ship! I loved seeing that. -project MOHOLE made history! - Ash

When my late mother (b. 1927, d. 2023) was in high school she openly spoke in class that the continents could almost fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The teacher and other students said that was wrong, how could they move? This would have been the early 40s. She was delighted when continental drift started showing up n our textbooks.

I asked my kindergarten teacher about south America and Africa fitting together like a puzzle. I was 4y old.

Hearing the projector music lag and stretch takes me way back to elementary school. Sitting in a semi-dark room with the sounds humming and clicking of the projector singing its own hypnotic lullaby.

This is such a good movie, giving a perfect illustration of a scientific revolution, all in Terribly Poshe British style! It also shows some things that seem to have been forgotten. I've had arguments about how Africa used to be at the South Pole with people online, but this takes it for granted.

How refreshing to see back in history to a time when Horizon was worth watching. During my junior school education I was thrashed by a woman teacher who took exception to me talking to my neighbour rather than paying attention to her - the subject of my absorbing conversation was how Africa looked to fit together with South America. Most of the class laughed and joined in with my teacher's ridicule. Later, I cut up a school atlas and played about with the continental shapes and stuck them on a small ball which was handily the right size - I left the finished result on my teacher's chair. Her expression on discovery has stayed with me over the intervening seventy years. Pure joy.

I learned this from exactly this kind of documentaries when I was a teenager! For me it seemed so natural logical that I could not understand why it was even thought controversial at the time...❤😊

Greetings from the BIG SKY. I was a kid when this concept first came out. Neat idea to present to kids at the time. Now, it is funny how everyone looks at tectonics as known fact. Hat's off to the researchers!

when this first hit the fore , i was a young man fresh out of high school in the 1970s . this was featured in magazines of the day like pop science and so fourth. huge debate and heated controversies abounded . even my late dad refused to believe in it considering that this theory was around since the 1950s or earlier ,

This brings back memories of O’ Level Geography in Coventry, UK way back in 1983. I remember the teacher telling us that Plate Tectonics had moved on since this recording had been made, but it was a good introduction to the theory of the subject.

Very impressed that this documentary takes the concept of expanding Earth seriously, as did most of these scientists at the time. I think the evidence for expansion tectonics is even greater today.

I'm very interested in geology and have studied the subject a lot, and still stayed glued to the screen the whole time. This is the kind of excellent documentary I love to watch - focusing on facts and explaining in creative and pedagogic ways. And now I want a globe where the continents can be moved around. 😊

Wow , it must be really exciting and challenging for these scientists and engineers to discover such phenomenons at that time with limited resources.

That closing monologue will never cease to give me chills. Powerful stuff!

As a total lay person I found this a great documentary. What is outlines, for the Earth Sciences, was nothing less than a scientific revolution on a scale equivalent to that which General Relatively was for Physics. A truly profound breakthrough well described in this excellent film.

What is brilliant is that these scientists figured this out long before humans had been to space and seen photos of the big blue marble.

What a wonderful historical document recording the development of our knowledge of late tectonics. I've never seen such a cogent description. I remember learning about it in school when it was still a recently-developed theory.

Looking at the globe when I was in 4th grade, I discovered plate tectonics right then and there. The teacher basically told me I was nuts!

I tried to explain this very theory to my third-grade teacher in 1965 and was beaten with a club for "disrupting the class". I couldn't see very well and edges seemed to blur together but I could see on a map that the continents would fit perfectly together if they were moved in obvious directions.

I just rewatched this and love that I've actually been able to put faces and voices to those who were once just names in books. I learned about plate tectonics about 50 years ago and am still fascinated by the forces that shape our planet.

Historically significant indeed. I lived through the great changing of perspective, then an unthinkable fringe idea, now an explanation solved pretty much to its bottom rung. We knew nothing of black holes either. Loved the drunken orchestra. That sounded like a merry recording session!

Those globe models are fantastic, even the "tiny Earth" hypothesis one.

The accents, the crackle in the audio from the old microphones, the retro synth music, the genuinely interesting earth history, everything about this video is so soothing to my soul

50 years ago and such great understanding of Earth science. 50 years later and we have people deigning scientific facts

My college education in Geology taught me that Wallace discovered Plate Techtonics. My Grand Father the head of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden Colorado talked to many times of Continental Drift. He to was very interested in Wallace's observation. In my youth I became useful to my Grandfathers field studies with his students. Partly due t9 what he taught me in Geology. Partly due to my ability to scrabble up cliff faces. My Father was a Petrolium Geologist in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Through this 20 mile canyon. One can find in Rock the entire life cycle of the earth. From Permian all the way to today. It was the playground for my Grandfather. My Grandfather then combined Chemestry to determine the chemical makeup of the earths minerals. As such my Grandfather is now known as the Father of Geological Engineering.

We live on a molten ball of rock, churning with heat from the collision 4 billion years ago that gave us the moon. The crust is like a sheet of paper wrapping a basketball, floating on a sea of magma. The Pacific Ocean is empty of land because the Farallon plate carried all the microcontinents and island chains into the western boundary of the North American craton. Everything West of Utah owes its statehood to the subduction of Pacific crustal plates. If you've ever flown across the country and noticed the dramatic upheaval of land West of the great plains, now you know why. I took a geology class in high school in 1979, just a few years after plate tectonics was proven. I never knew that rocks could be so exciting!

I loved this video. It shows a very important part of earth science during it's infancy. I also remember back when this was made, that science was telling us if something isn't done & quickly, that by 1985, we'd be in a new ice age with mile thick glaciers again. It goes to show us that we can't ever buy into different theories at face value.

Fantastic ! Love these very descriptive professionally done narrations . The earth is an amazing place . Thank You.

why can I understand the speech and speaking patterns of people from over 50 years ago, better than people that are only 20 years younger than me? 🤔🤷

I wish I had found geology as interesting as a kid as I do now.

I remember the news about Professor Runcorn's untimely demise in San Diego. A truly terrible injustice. May he R.I.P.

As a film student I gotta say this documentary is put together in an amazing fashion. So cool how the science is still accurate today yet was groundbreaking when this work was produced.

I liked it a lot! 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼Sixty years ago these scientists were very, very ahead of their times! 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼

I love the music in this video. So warped and wonderful!

Loved every second of this. I remember being about 8 or 9 years old (1989) and learning about plate tectonics. It was basically a brand new science at that time.

I remember in the seventh grade science class in the late 70's, a student stated that some continents looked like they fit together. Our science teacher said it was a coincidence.

I found a reference to plate Tectonics in 1960 from our 1950 encyclopedia.

I lost all my concentration at 46:30 when I swear I thought that sideburn was moving by itself.

I was taught geophysics by Fred Vine when I was an undergraduate in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia from 1968 to 1970. What a privilege!

Dr Bill Williamson was my professor at the University of Arizona. What an exciting time that was to be starting a career in geology.

Yes I read about it in National Geographic magazine as a boy and loved to listen to this presentation once again. Our beautiful planet is very old indeed.

It’s interesting how so many disciplines came together to solve one common problem.

Świetny film👍 i nadal aktualny😮

Wonderful! So many great humans!

I am so excited by seeing this documentary! At 71 years of age, I realize how much I’ve missed in the changes of our world. Now, retired and with limited mobility (due to MS) I have decided to spend my time on learning all I can in these fields. I subscribed to this channel & others recommended and am so thrilled to find my interest here. See, there really are good things on the internet.😊

Thank you so very much for sharing this wonderfully informative documentary. 😊

This is an important time capsule of vintage geological and palaeontological sciences and nicely summarised quite a lot of concepts. It's a charming one, with plenty of too-the-point explanations. It is indeed, as the video description reads, a historically significant documentary. From the perspective of a palaeontologist with a lot of interest in the history of the subject, and it's numerous related fields, the documentary touches upon and mentions quite a lot of aspects of how the science was done. Having grown up in the 1990's with documentaries and books heavily influenced by the stratified legacies of the geoscience and palaeontology of the 1950's to 1980's prior, especially, there is a lot of nostalgia in this. Things you pick up in terms of noticing the changing nature of the subjects, the old ideas, the past generations pushing things forward at the forefront of their eras. It's nice to see. They were ahead of their time in a lot of ways and it's a style of documentary which I have always preferred to the often more sensationalist offerings of the 2000's to 2020's. Horizon began to become a lot more sensationalist in the last couple of decades, and it had a habit of leaning into the loud music. There is something refreshing about the old school documentary style. There is an honesty and sincerity to it which isn't always seen in more recent documentaries. Don't get me wrong, plenty of modern ones are fine. It's just a matter of finding the ones that don't just happen to have about 15 minutes of content uncharitably spread over 60 minutes. The begging the question stuff and drawing out pretty basic revelations to the general audience, happen in favour, more often, to treating the audience like it has the literacy and educational standards to handle things without hand holding. Modern television executives would probably look down their noses at this style of documentary, basically dismiss it as being (allegedly) too boring or stilted for the general audience and it's attention span. And these days, they might have a vague sort of point due to the way things have changed. All the same, it's all subjective. If you know what you're looking for in the quality of an old documentary like this, there is so much to appreciate from this. It has so much of the old nostalgia, while preserving what was an up and coming new wave of how science was presented on television (and the new and exciting work being done in geology at the time) The 1970's in general are so special in terms of the development of modern science communication in Geology and Palaeontology. Decades and in some cases, centuries of changing principles, reaching this uncanny crossroads in 20th century science and scientific communication. It is before my time but just because I consider the documentary old now, doesn't mean I miss the fact that it was a very cutting edge way of looking at things in it's day. They were really changing things up. It looks retro now as all things do when they age. Again, though, if you know what you're looking for in how things changed in documentaries and scientific presentations, the charm of this one is unmistakeable. It reminds me strongly of a Dinosaur book I was given as a child during the 1990's, which was absolutely packed to the rafters with what was then, the most up to date palaeontology regarding Dinosaurs and the Mesozoic Era in general. The exhaustive photographs, the many questions and answers pages, the high quality prints of what was then very high quality photography and stills of fossil specimens, gathered at some great difficulty by the makers of the book. So much of a range of 1970's vintage to the then more modern early 1990's palaeontology. Some of the art was inspired by 1960's reconstructions. Some looked distinctly 1970's or 1980's. The sheer amount of it mixed together was a bit wild. Even as a kid you could tell that a lot of the art was more or less retro stuff padding out the pages because it would have been a challenge to fill so many hundreds and hundreds of pages. Some of the reconstructions were right up to date as of the 1990's. I still have that book to this day. It gives me the same feeling that this documentary does. Not just that the past met the future, but that the process of the geological and palaeontological sciences had really come of age by the 1970's and that it could record itself and it's methods more meticulously than ever before, in printed form and documentary form. There were photos of people in white lab coats working in the 1970's and 1980's, making museum exhibits and preparing fossils for study, with large text boxes explaining what they were doing. You could see their methods and so much of the science had come a long way. There'd be comparisons of Ankylosaurs like _Euoplocephalus tutus_ to battle tanks and _Triceratops horridus_ to charging knights. There'd be charts showing paintings of different Dinosaur teeth and diagrams of the serrations and which food they'd eat. There'd film reels with panels of Dinosaur palaeoart and textboxes next to them explaining what each panel is showing, winding across double pages. There'd be purple 3D photo prints and red and blue 3D art prints which stood out a bit with the _Tyrannosaurus rex_ shaped red and blue 3D lens, cardboard glasses, that came with the book. It was the big book compendium of a similar series which was collected as a magazine, with species fact files and lots of 'behind the scenes' double spreads on different aspects of geoscience and palaeontology. It is one of the things that inspired me to become a palaeontologist (that book, not this documentary) Dinosaur related palaeomedia was mostly responsible for the rest (e.g. Walking With Dinosaurs, 1999) The book shows it's age now in spite of my best efforts to look after it. But it was used so much and moved around so often, it was worn out a bit as a kid, before I learnt how to look after books properly. This documentary really does feel like a multidisciplinary time capsule. The book did too. A sincere combination of dozens and dozens of people's contributions and achievements, with a lot of them having been the result of some very new lines of thinking. For instance, the inimitable Dr Robert Bakker had been changing the ways we think about some Dinosaurs, especially the Theropods, with his 'Dinosaur Heresies' observations. Of course, slightly older work by his own mentor had played into this massively as well (Ostrom) This is just one of many examples. What I am getting at, in the palaeontological world, is what Bakker himself dubbed, 'the Dinosaur Renaissance'. In geological terms, there was broader shift in how plate tectonics and crustal geology was being educated to the public and arguably in how widely it was being accepted. The Cold War had inevitably given a basis to many changing perceptions of the oceanic basins of the world. Sea floor mapping, done at some frantic pace for good (albeit macabre) reason, between the Cold War superpowers, causing a surge in discoveries and implications regarding how the continental and oceanic crust was being formed. Theories became better understood and the pioneers, as shown in this documentary, were at the forefront of changing how this would be communicated to the general public. Old theories still lingered and new ones blossomed in what may only be considered to be a flowering of the garden of geoscience. The 1970's were an undeniably special time in this historical record; and it should importantly inform how we should remember the entire process. While it is very true that earlier decades had seen major step changes and leaps forward in our understanding of geology and palaeontology, amongst other fields related to this, and that they had their own part in the story just as important, there was something particularly, transitional, about the 1970's. I feel I could say the same about the 1990's and 2000's, thanks to the rise of the internet in how it was beginning to be a massive contribution to how science was done and how publications were more widely distributed. More and more things were going digital. But still. Even in a time (1970's) when computing power was so relatively low, the landmark achievements they were making had really, begun to turn the tide. It feels like decades of planning and discovery had begun to amass into something more wizened by it's own age. It's easy to forget that as a science, palaeontology was still young at only about a century old in the early 20th century. Proto-palaeontology fields were a thing of course. But in terms of the formal stuff, it's not that old. Geology more broadly has had a longer history, though again, it's not _that_ old and in terms of the televised history of geology, that's of course just as limited historically as anything else. One of things I love about this documentary is that you can still see the earnest practical models and creative ways of conveying information that would probably be rendered in cheap and cheerful cgi or more expensive software today. And I like a blend of both worlds in that regard. It has it's place. It'd be interesting to see how many could even make some of these practical models now off the cuff. They had to get their hands dirty and go out and make stuff back then and I really like it. It should be a skill a lot of geoscientists and evolutionary scientists can still do, if nothing else, for lecture purposes. There is something in it. Obviously, when this documentary came out, it was at the dawn of a new age of discoveries and the coming of age of a lot of much older achievements which had provided it's deep foundations.

Imagine if they actually made documentaries like this instead of just having one presenter pontificating like they do now or even worse ones on ancient aliens, real life mermaids and still alive Megalodons?

An outstanding documentary from the pre-hype era - thank you

Fascinating. Thanks for posting.

My school teacher told me to shut up when I saw the perfect jigsaw on the word map and commented it. This was as late as 1978. Took a while before this knowledge reached everyone...

The music for Australia's elephantine waltz with the south pole proper cracked me up

Another important note: this video is _extremely_ North American-centric. In continental Europe, the idea of continental drift was already mainstream by the end of the 1920s, and in the UK by the end of 1950s. North American (and to a lesser extent, English) geologists were very much against the hypothesis on largely ideological grounds (American scientists in particular were very vocal about opposing "Continental science", (oversimplifying) in this case represented by the idea that the Earth is mostly unchanging, itself coming from opposition to Christian accounts of "the Flood" which was _mostly_ taken as mainstream geology before the geological revolution).

Right on. Thanks for sharing.

Prff Tullis is a giant of earth sciences and still working at it .

This idea was first proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegner, who also coined the name Pangaea. These people in the 1970s seem to overlook this fact, which I studied n high school in 1967 and 1968. Sad not to acknowledge that.

I just happened upon this video and found it quite a fascinating historical document, having forgotten that plate tectonics was such a new idea in the '60s and '70s when I was in college and then grad school. Also a good reminder that a lot of research was done the hard way even then with chart recorders and hand plotting of data on tracing paper. Interestingly, the new Indiana Jones movie, which is set in 1969 uses 'continental drift' as a plot device. Prof Jones proves to be very knowledgeable, 'Indeed'. By the way, the distorted music is probably due to the original film having been transferred to video tape early on and the tape itself getting stretched out of shape on the reel with age (tape tectonics, if you will)--I don't think it was the director's attempt to sound doomy and gloomy like they do on modern Discovery Channel shows, as others have suggested.

Thank you for posting- clear explanation of an important topic

i just love all the clever props!

And the award for most impressive sideburn goes to….. 46:52

It is indeed a great thing that you listed other people who should also be remembered - this happens all too often unfortunately - really incredible to watch this as I grew up in a world where plate tectonics was already established.

Thank you for sharing

Surprisingly well put together, consider the time when it was filmed

The thing about Plate Tectonics is that it was known for hundreds of years. Its just no one really had the means to explain it to other people or was just laughed at and thrown out. It was out of the reach of the human mind as to what kind of force could move land masses. In modern terms it would be like trying to think about the scale of the universe.

As a vintage chainsaw collector seeing them use that McCulloch drill made my day. I have a similar one on the shelf unfortunately no drill attachment

Nice eyeopening video on earth plates with clear information. Thanks a lot

What a great piece of science communication. That quote at the end is a real slam dunk.

Very interesting, though I think the scientist who proposed the ‘shrinking earth’ theory felt a bit of a berk later on

I have not watched the video yet, but it looks very interesting. I took my first year of geology in my freshman year 1969-1970. My professor, Dr. James Walls, discussed plate tectonics but the text book did not. The text book mentioned continental drift as a as yet not generally accepted concept that had not been proven, nor had the mechanism been explained. Dr. Walls (the best lecturer I ever had) explained plate tectonics , the mechanism, mountain building, earthquakes, etc. but pointed out that the theory was not yet fully accepted. Ever since I've always wanted to go back and repeat the course to see the topics with all the new knowledge integrated. By the way, back then birds were not dinosaurs even though it seemed to me that that might be logical. That thought was confirmed in my mind when I read Dinosaur Heresies by Bakker back in the (I think) 1980s. Paleontology was what I was interested in but I was lousy at it. Lucky for me I was good at writing computer software.

Nice to see Fred Vine again; he taught me in the School of Environmental Studies at UEA in the late 1970's.

What an amazing period of scientific history!

Imagine at that time with minimal computing tools, they were able to come up with ground breaking discovery with manual computing and a lot of mental visualization of how things might have happened. Did they use more of their mental capacity then compared to their modern day equivalents.

what a wonderful combination of intuition and creativity

I love programs like this. I find it so interesting. Anything to do with understanding the planet. I guess it would be called geology.

40:00 The narrator just casually spoke of humanity colonising other planets, like we wouldn't notice! 👀

I didn't notice credit given to Canadian geophysicist J Tuzo Wilson. He co-authored the paper explaining Juan de Fuca Ridge, explained San Andreas as a transform fault, and explained the Hawaiian Island chain as the ocean floor moving over a hot spot.