The Day the Earth Moved

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Roland Pease tells the story of how fifty years ago geologists finally became convinced that the earth’s crust is made up of shifting plates. The idea of mobile continents, continental drift, had been talked about, for example because it looked like Africa and South America had once been joined, and were now separated by the Atlantic. But given the solidity of rocks and the vastness of continents, that idea made no sense. Until plate tectonics, as it became known, gave it a scientific basis and rebuilt it into a mechanism that explained earthquakes, mountain belts, chains of volcanic islands and many other geological phenomena. Roland Pease talks to many of the key researchers in the story, now in their 70s and 80s, and finds out how their work transformed our understanding of the earth.

Picture: Tectonic plates of planet earth - map with names of major and minor plates, Credit: PeterHermesFurian

Presenter: Roland Pease

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:36.0	This is the BBC.
0:41.0	Welcome to the 50th anniversary of the discovery of plate tectonics by Dan
0:45.0	Mackenzie and Jason Morgan at the biggest Earth Sciences meeting the
0:49.5	AGU just two weeks back 24,000 attendees a special moment was declared.
0:57.0	I thought by now there would already have been Nobel Prizes for plate tectonics, probably
1:01.2	for Jason, Dan, and Fred Vine.
1:04.0	But Nobel Prizes are a dime a dozen compared with scientific revolutions,
1:07.8	and I can't even conceive of how satisfying it must have been
1:11.2	to have created one of the great scientific revolutions of the
1:14.0	20th century. But that's what I want to explore here on Discovery from the BBC, a
1:19.7	revolution in science that more than any deserves the accolade of
1:23.8	Tectonic shift a phrase that once would have made no sense but today is
1:28.6	rolled out without thought by politicians cultural commentators all of us at some point. I'm Roland Pease and the
1:36.2	revolution hadn't started when I was born. Yet by the time I was at secondary school
1:41.5	it was already a paradigm, just a few die-hards
1:44.9	holding out against this dangerous unifying concept in Earth sciences.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.