Spreading Seafloors - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 117

That same year, Hess prepared a thirty-eight-page manuscript outlining his
thinking about the seafloor and submitted it for inclusion in a forthcoming volume
to be titled The Sea, Ideas and Observations . But as often happens with a multi-
author volume, which cannot go to the printer until the slowest contributor sub-
mits, the project was long delayed. Hess lost patience, writing privately that “my
manuscript is timely now but may be very dead by 1964.” 8 He obtained permis-
sion to withdraw the paper and place it instead in a special volume to be published
by the Geological Society of America and dedicated to Hess's Princeton professor
andnowhiscolleague,ArthurBuddington. Petrologic Studies: A Volume to Honor
A. F. Buddington , eventually appeared in November 1962. 9 But some eighteen
months before, in March or April 1961, Hess had begun to circulate to his circle of
influential colleagues a preprint of the article. “Preprint” might suggest an unpol-
ished draft subject to much further revision, but Hess's article had an official-look-
ing cover and appeared ready for printing. 10 The final version in the Buddington
volume, titled “History of Ocean Basins,” differed only slightly and in no import-
ant way from the preprint.
Hess explained what had led him to accept the paleomagnetic evidence:
Remanent magnetism of old rocks shows that position [ sic ] of the magnetic poles has changed
in a rather regular manner with time, but this migration of the poles as measured in Europe,
North America, Australia, India, etc., has not been the same for each of these land masses.
This strongly indicates independent movement in direction and amount of large portions of the
Earth's surface with respect to the rotational axis. This could be most easily accomplished by
a convecting mantle system which involves actual movement of the Earth's surface passively
riding on the upper part of the convecting cell. 11
Hess began by describing his paper as “an essay in geopoetry,” a testament to
the Dutch geologist Johannes Umbgrove, who had urged geologists to give rein
to their imaginations. The imaginative Hess never theless went out of his way to
establish his fidelity to uniformitarianism. In the first paragraph he wrote: “In or-
der not to travel any further into the realm of fantasy than is absolutely necessary
I shall stick as closely as possible to a uniformitarian approach; even so, at least
one great catastrophe will be required early in the Earth's history.” Farther along,
he noted that the work of another scientist suggested “that the water of the oceans
may be very young, that oceans came into existence largely since the Paleozoic.
This violates uniformitarianism, to which the writer is dedicated.”