From continental drift to plate tectonics

Twenty-five years ago, on 7 September 1963, a paper by F.J. Vine and D.H. Matthews, "Magnetic Anomalies Over Oceanic Ridges", appeared in Nature. It attracted little immediate interest. But the paper turned out to be one of the seminal contributions to a sea-change in the Earth sciences that brewed through the 1950s and early 1960s and culminated in the theory of plate tectonics. Here, Henry Frankel describes the genesis and influence of the work of Vine and the contributions of some of the many Earth scientists who participated in the transformation of their discipline. In the following Review Article (p. 131), Peter Molnar picks up the story and reviews the progress made in applying plate tectonics to the thorny question of continental deformation.