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Hello, America is getting further away from Europe.

This is not a political statement, but a geological fact.

Just as the Pacific is getting smaller, the Red Sea bigger, the Himalayas are still going up, and one day the

Horn of Africa will be a large island.

These are findings from the theory of plate tectonics, a revolutionary idea in 20th century

geology that saw the continents of the earth to be dancing to the music of deep time

a dance of incredible slowness yet powerful enough to throw up the mountains and pour away the oceans and dictate the character of the planet.

Plate tectonics was a genuine scientific revolution.

It made geologists and many more besides profoundly rethink what the Earth was, how it worked and how it

related to all the things in it. With me to discuss plate tectonics at

Jocan, Senior Fellow in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds.

Lynn Frostig, Director of the Hull Environment Research Institute and Professor

of Physical Geography at the University of Hull, and Richard Corfield visiting senior lecturer

in Earth Sciences at the Open University.

Richard Corfeld, plate tectonics is the mechanism by which the continents move around

the surface of the Earth.

It was developed in the 1960s, but let's go back.

What sort of idea did people have of the sense of the movement of the Earth

of any?

Well, the sense that the continents may have fitted together actually goes back to the 16th century when Abraham

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