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Vine, a graduate student, naturally thought it would be wonderful for “Bullard
andVine”toauthorthepaperinwhichhisspeculationsappeared,butthesagacious
Bullard, perhaps anticipating the lukewarm response, said “no way.” 2 Matthews
seemed “disinterested,” so Vine wrote up a short paper and submitted it under
both their names to Nature , which published “Magnetic Anomalies Over Ocean
Ridges” on September 7, 1963. 3
Likemanygreatscientificideas,theessentialconceptwassimple,sosimplethat
to summarize it took only two sentences:
If the main crustal layer of the oceanic crust is formed over a convective up-current in the
mantle at the center of an oceanic ridge, it will be magnetized in the current direction of the
Earth's field. Thus, if spreading of the ocean floor occurs, blocks of alternately normal and re-
versely magnetized material would drift away from the center of the ridge and parallel to the
crest of it. 4
In the Vine-Matthews model, the magnetic anomaly stripes of Raff and Mason
represent alternating belts of volcanic rock that froze on the ridge, became mag-
netized according to the direction of the field at that time, normal or reversed, and
were then swept to either side as the seafloor spread. The normally magnetized
belts give rise to a positive anomaly; the reversely magnetized ones to a negative
anomaly. When the Vine-Matthews paper appeared, not just Ron Mason but an
entire generation of geologists could have kicked themselves for not recognizing
what suddenly seemed obvious. 5 Some might have recalled Thomas Huxley's re-
mark on first encountering Darwin's natural selection: “How extremely stupid not
to have thought of that.” 6
The concept was “virtually a corollary of current ideas on ocean floor spreading
and periodic reversals in the Earth's magnetic field,” Vine and Matthews wrote. 7
But wemust notforget that in1963,most geologists were notaware ofthose ideas,
and those who were tended not to accept seafloor spreading, or magnetic field re-
versals, or both. One year after the publication in Nature , the hypothesis was going
over “like a lead balloon,” Vine would remember. He was “getting pretty discour-
aged and beginning to lose faith,” adding, “People just turned away.” 8
The 1964 Royal Society symposium, reviewed earlier and held the year after the
Vine-Matthews paper appeared, drew many who were at least tilting toward drift.
Here, it seemed, was just what the attendees had been waiting for: evidence that
the ocean floor was spreading and might be able to carry the continents piggyback.
ButonlyonespeakerevenbotheredtomentiontheVine-Matthewshypothesis,and
then only to thrice-damn it: “The origin of the magnetic anomaly patterns is un-
known,” the Vine-Matthews hypothesis “is probably not adequate to account for
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