Plate tectonics has revolutionized virtually every discipline of the Earth sciences since the late 1960s and early 1970s. It has served as a unifying model or paradigm for explaining geologic phenomena that were formerly considered in unrelated fashion. Plate tectonics describes seismic activity, volcanism, mountain building, and various other Earth processes in terms of the structure and mechanical behaviour of a small number of enormous rigid plates thought to constitute the outer part of the planet (i.e., the lithosphere). This all-encompassing theory grew out of observations and ideas about continental drift and seafloor spreading.

In 1912 the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that throughout most of geologic time there was only one continental mass, which he named Pangaea. At some time during the Mesozoic Era, Pangaea fragmented and the parts began to drift apart. Westward drift of the Americas opened the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian block drifted across the Equator to join with Asia. In 1937 the South African Alexander Du Toit modified Wegener’s hypothesis by suggesting the existence of two primordial continents: Laurasia in the north and Gondwanaland in the south. Aside from the congruency of continental shelf margins across the Atlantic, proponents of continental drift have amassed impressive geologic evidence to support their views. Similarities in fossil terrestrial organisms in pre-Cretaceous (older than about 146 million years) strata of Africa and South America and in pre-Jurassic rocks (older than about 200 million years) of Australia, India, Madagascar, and Africa are explained if these continents were formerly connected but difficult to account for otherwise. Fitting the Americas with the continents across the Atlantic brings together similar kinds of rocks and structures. Evidence of widespread glaciation during the late Paleozoic is found in Antarctica, southern South America, southern Africa, India, and Australia. If these continents were formerly united around the South Polar region, this glaciation becomes explicable as a unified sequence of events in time and space.

Interest in continental drift heightened during the 1950s as knowledge of Earth’s magnetic field during the geologic past developed from the studies of Stanley K. Runcorn, Patrick M.S. Blackett, and others. Ferromagnetic minerals such as magnetite acquire a permanent magnetization when they crystallize as components of igneous rock. The direction of their magnetization is the same as the direction of Earth’s magnetic field at the place and time of crystallization. Particles of magnetized minerals released from their parent igneous rocks by weathering may later realign themselves with the existing magnetic field at the time these particles are incorporated into sedimentary deposits. Studies of the remanent magnetism in suitable rocks of different ages from over the world indicate that the magnetic poles were in different places at different times. The polar wandering curves are different for the several continents, but in important instances these differences are reconciled on the assumption that continents now separated were formerly joined. The curves for Europe and North America, for example, are reconciled by the assumption that America has drifted about 30° westward relative to Europe since the Triassic Period (approximately 251 million to 200 million years ago).

In the early 1960s a major breakthrough in understanding the way the modern Earth works came from two studies of the ocean floor. First, the American geophysicists Harry H. Hess and Robert S. Dietz suggested that new ocean crust was formed along mid-oceanic ridges between separating continents; and second, Drummond H. Matthews and Frederick J. Vine of Britain proposed that the new oceanic crust acted like a magnetic tape recorder insofar as magnetic anomaly strips parallel to the ridge had been magnetized alternately in normal and reversed order, reflecting the changes in polarity of Earth’s magnetic field. This theory of seafloor spreading then needed testing, and the opportunity arose from major advances in deepwater drilling technology. The Joint Oceanographic Institutions Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) project began in 1969, continued with the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), and, since 1976, with the International Phase of Ocean Drilling (IPOD) project. These projects have produced more than 500 boreholes in the floor of the world’s oceans, and the results have been as outstanding as the plate-tectonic theory itself. They confirm that the oceanic crust is everywhere younger than about 200 million years and that the stratigraphic age determined by micropaleontology of the overlying oceanic sediments is close to the age of the oceanic crust calculated from the magnetic anomalies.

The plate-tectonic theory, which embraces both continental drift and seafloor spreading, was formulated in the mid-1960s by the Canadian geologist J. Tuzo Wilson, who described the network of mid-oceanic ridges, transform faults, and subduction zones as boundaries separating an evolving mosaic of enormous plates, and who proposed the idea of the opening and closing of oceans and eventual production of an orogenic belt by the collision of two continents.

Up to this point, no one had considered in any detail the implications of the plate-tectonic theory for the evolution of continental orogenic belts; most thought had been devoted to the oceans. In 1969 John Frederick Dewey of the University of Cambridge outlined an analysis of the Caledonian-Appalachian orogenic belts in terms of a complete plate-tectonic cycle of events, and this provided a model for the interpretation of other pre-Mesozoic (Paleozoic and Precambrian) belts. Some of the oldest volcano-sedimentary rocks on Earth, in the 3.8 billion-year-old Isua belt in West Greenland, have been shown by geologists from the Tokyo Institute of Technology to have formed in a plate-tectonic setting—i.e., in a trench or mouth of a subduction zone—and it is plausible that the oldest known rocks, the 4.28 billion-year-old Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in Quebec, Canada, formed in a similar setting. For a detailed discussion of plate-tectonic theory and its far-reaching effects, see plate tectonics.

Water resources and seawater chemistry

Quantitative studies of the distribution of water have revealed that an astonishingly small part of Earth’s water is contained in lakes and rivers. Ninety-seven percent of all the water is in the oceans, and, of the fresh water constituting the remainder, three-fourths is locked up in glacial ice and most of the rest is in the ground. Approximate figures are also now available for the amounts of water involved in the different stages of the hydrologic cycle. Of the 859 millimetres of annual global precipitation, 23 percent falls on the lands; but only about a third of the precipitation on the lands runs directly back to the sea, the remainder being recycled through the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration. Subsurface groundwater accumulates by infiltration of rainwater into soil and bedrock. Some may run off into rivers and lakes, and some may reemerge as springs or aquifers. Advanced techniques are used extensively in groundwater studies nowadays. The rate of groundwater flow, for example, can be calculated from the breakdown of radioactive carbon-14 by measuring the time it takes for rainwater to pass through the ground, while numerical modeling is used to study heat and mass transfer in groundwater. High-precision equipment is used for measuring down-hole temperature, pressure, flow rate, and water level. Groundwater hydrology is important in studies of fractured reservoirs, subsidence resulting from fluid withdrawal, geothermal resource exploration, radioactive waste disposal, and aquifer thermal-energy storage.

Chemical analyses of trace elements and isotopes of seawater are conducted as part of the Geochemical Ocean Sections (Geosecs) program. Of the 92 naturally occurring elements, nearly 80 have been detected in seawater or in the organisms that inhabit it, and it is thought to be only a matter of time until traces of the others are detected. Contrary to the idea widely circulated in the older literature of oceanography, that the relative proportions of the oceans’ dissolved constituents are constant, investigations since 1962 have revealed statistically significant variations in the ratios of calcium and strontium to chlorinity. The role of organisms as influences on the composition of seawater has become better understood with advances in marine biology. It is now known that plants and animals may collect certain elements to concentrations as much as 100,000 times their normal amounts in seawater. Abnormally high concentrations of beryllium, scandium, chromium, and iodine have been found in algae; of copper and arsenic in both the soft and skeletal parts of invertebrate animals; and of zirconium and cerium in plankton.