Upheaval from the Abyss
Upheaval from the Abyss
Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution
The deep oceans are the last great frontier remaining on Earth. Humans have conquered the vast wilderness of the terrestrial surface, from the searing deserts and dark forests of the tropics to the icy polar regions. Today, anyone with enough ambition and money can travel upriver into the heart of the Borneo jungle, climb Mount Everest, or spend the night at the South Pole. But the oceans beyond the continental shelves remain forbidding, beyond the reach of science, adventurism, and commerce.
Not long ago, scientists viewed the ocean floor as a vast, featureless plain, an ancient repository of detritus eroded from the surface of an unchanging Earth. Light never reached the seemingly lifeless depths. The ocean basins were only of marginal scholarly interest. This all changed with the Herculean quest to discover what lay on the world's ocean floor—a quest that inspired the continental drift-plate tectonics revolution and overturned prevailing scientific notions of how the Earth’s surface was created, rearranged, and destroyed.
Upheaval from the Abyss spans a 130-year period, beginning with the early, backbreaking efforts to map the depths during the age of sail; continuing with improvements in research methods spurred by maritime disaster and war; and culminating in the publication of the first map of the world’s ocean floor in 1977. The author brings this tale to life by weaving through it the personalities of the scientists-explorers who struggled to see the face of the deep, and reveals not only the facts of how the ocean floor was mapped, but also the human dimensions of what the scientists experienced and felt while in the process.
Lawrence captures the excitement of the new idea, and gives at least a flavour of how great an upset it caused. . . . The book is not merely a good story, but also has messages for science at large. . . . This book is a good read, and raises interesting questions concerning not merely plate tectonics, but the conduct of science in general.
Upheaval from the Abyss is a popular retelling of the emergence of the theory of plate tectonics. It is written in layman's language and tells almost as much about the lives of the major players as it does about the revolution in human knowledge that they achieved. . . . For anyone still not familiar with the multifaceted story of how this discovery came about, I cannot think of a better place to begin. I lived through these times. As a program director then at the National Science Foundation, I worked with many of the key scientists involved. But when I read Upheaval from the Abyss, I still found much that was new to me.
Lawrence summarizes a huge amount of information, biographical and scientific, to make this one journey understandable and readable for the average person. . . . He never talks down to his readers.
Back in 1873àscientists didnÆt even know how deep the oceans were, let alone how they originated, or what made up their floors. The geologists and geophysicists who answered those questions created our modern, plate-tectonic world view. This enjoyable book is their story.
and hard work
Death on a glacier
Radical notions
Sowing the wind
Reaping the whirlwind
The pathfinder
The abyss
Challenger
Titanic effect
The swinger
Wildcatter
A rumor or war
and the real thing
Gunfire and geology
The upstarts
Vema
The gully
Shaken
and stirred
The paleomagicians
Revelation
Revolution
Alpine vistas to abyssal plains
Summing up
