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This is the Nature Pastcast, each month raiding Nature's Archive

and looking at key moments in science. In this show, it's back to the swinging 60cast, each month raiding Nature's archive and looking at key moments in science.

In this show, it's back to the swinging 60s, a time when Continent 2 began to move.

Nature, 7th September, 1963.

Page 90. Nature, 7th September, 1963. Page 947.

Magnetic anomalies over oceanic ridges.

The paper, when published, went over like the provobial lead balloon.

I mean, there's all sorts of comments in the literature, you know, people referring

to it as a startling idea. Now it's kind of taken as one of the first and most important

steps on the way towards plate tectonics, but at the time, it kind of fell like a stone in the water.

My name is Melinda Baldwin. I'm a historian of science, and I'm working on a

book project about the history of nature. My name is Fred Vine. I was a graduate student at Cambridge,

and I wrote this paper with Drum Matthews, my supervisor in mid-1963. What they were proposing in this paper is that we might be able to support continental drift theory

or really more accurately seafloor spreading theory by looking at magnetic patterns across

mid-ocean ridges, which are ridges in the ocean floor.

Figure one illustrates the essential features of magnetic anomalies over the oceanic ridges.

...