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His studies began to convince him that far more than Vancouver Island and
the Queen Charlotte Islands (the two prime pieces of the Wrangellia terrane
in Canada) had moved up the coast. Irving began to wonder if not just this
terrane, but something larger, had traveled up. Soon Wrangellia received a
new name: the Insular Superterrane. It now encompassed not only Vancou-
ver and the Queen Charlottes hut all of the coastal mountains of British Co-
lumbia as well. The vision now was of a
huge
hunk of real estate—a subcon-
tinent something like India in size, but longer and skinnier—smashing and
accreting onto the coastline. Irving coined a new name for this superterrane,
calling it Baja British Columbia after Baja California, the latitude from
which he believed it had come, so long ago. The entire idea became known
as the Baja
British Columbia hypothesis.
Irving was no stranger to controversy. As a graduate student at Cam-
bridge University in the 1950s, he had been one of the first of his generation
to embrace paleomagnetics as a tool for studying past continental positions.
1 lis studies, which were conducted just before the emergence of continental
drift and plate tectonics as an accepted theory, cleatly showed that either the
continents were drifting or the poles of the ancient earth had had tendency
to wander. Irving refused to accept the latter possibility and thus embraced
the idea that the continents had drifted. Unfortunately, Cambridge Univer-
sity was not so open-minded and refused to award him his hard-earned PhD.
Irving was forced to start again at another university. Only much later did a
very sheepish Cambridge award Irving an honorary PhD.
As the 1980s progressed, even this enormous land mass grew larger in
the conception of the geophysicists. Now, not only the coastal mountains
and Vancouver Island in British Columbia (the Insular Superterrane) were
thought to have drifted; the Intermontane region—the entire suite of gigan-
tic mountains that make up most of British Columbia—was added into the
mix as well. By the late 1980s, geologists from the University of Washington
(Darrel Cowan and his students Paul Umhoefer, Mark Brandon, and John
Garver) had refined this model. They put it on a fat more rigorous footing by
conducting kinematic studies showing how the plate movement could have
produced this event.
