Spreading Seafloors - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 113

FIGURE 16 . The modern paleomagnetic timescale. Black = normal, white = reversed. Source :
U.S. Geological Survey.
Stripes on the Seafloor
Ron Mason, a lecturer in geophysics at Imperial College, London, spent 1951 and
1952 on sabbatical leave at the California Institute of Technology. Like many geo-
physicists, Mason had started out in physics but been drawn to the earth sciences.
In the spring of 1952, he happened to attend a meeting at the Scripps Institute of
Oceanography at La Jolla, California, where he heard of a plan to measure the