Photo: Harry Hess argues that the continents had once been one, and have drifted apart. With the discovery of plate tectonics and the mapping of the earth into about 12 plates, plus the ...

It confirmed sea-floor spreading as hypothesized by Hess, and thus "continental drift," originally proposed by Alfred Wegener back in 1912. It convinced many that plate tectonics was the best ...

This reduction, mostly resulting from a global slowdown in seafloor spreading, caused ocean basins to deepen. In the new work ...

In the new work, the researchers considered various possible initial conditions for the area and ages of ocean crust, as well as crust destruction rates, calculating that the ancient seafloor ...

Heirtzler, J. R., Dickinson, G. O., Herron, E. M., Pitman, III, W. C., and Le Pichon, X., J. Geophys. Res., 73, 2119 (1968).