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an important calibration of the magnetic reversal chronology, which until then was
well calibrated only for the first few million years.
Menard and others have remarked that most scientists are converted to a new
idea by observations from within their own speciality. Thus palaeomagnetic polar
wandering converted a small minority of geophysicists to continental drift. Later,
the dramatic evidence of seafloor magnetic stripes, earthquake distributions and
fault plane solutions converted a majority of geophysicists to seafloor spreading. To
many of the more traditional geologists, however, such geophysical observations
were still unfamiliar, and they were unsure how to regard them. However, fossil ages
are a long-standing concept in geology, and something to which most geologists
can readily relate. Thus, although the deep-sea sediment ages were not published
until 1970, they were important for spreading the word to the great majority of
geologists who work on continental geology.
This completes my short survey of some of the most direct and compelling
evidence that led to the acceptance of plate tectonics by a majority of geologists.
There is much other evidence and there were many more players, but a knowledge
of these observations suffices to place plate tectonic motions on a firm empirical
footing.
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