A nine-part narrated series on how plate tectonics went from a fringe idea that could end a young scientist's career to something every geologist takes for granted. Written for curious people who do not know any geology and do not need to.
The strange part is who worked it out. Almost none of them were geologists, and hardly any of them were trying to. Surveyors measuring India for an empire discovered that mountains have roots. A physicist built a machine to weigh atoms, and it gave us the age of the Earth. Echo sounders built to hunt submarines mapped the bottom of the sea. A global network of listening posts, buried in sixty countries so that two governments could sign a treaty about nuclear weapons, found the place where the sea floor goes to die.
Geology's revolution was not made by geologists thinking harder. It was made by other people's tools.
Every episode here has its full transcript and a table of every quotation in it — what is verbatim, what is a fragment, what is paraphrased, and where each one comes from. That is unusual for a podcast, and for a series about how people came to be sure of something it seemed like the least we could do.
Where to start: with the introduction, "The View from a Small Island". It runs about sixteen minutes, and it is the most personal of the series.
Episodes
- IntroThe View from a Small IslandI grew up on a coral island, and I was taught that it had been lifted out of the sea by “earth movements”. Nobody ever told me what an earth movement was.
- IBefore the QuestionIn 1650, an archbishop worked out that the world began on a Saturday evening in October. Not the year. The evening.
- IIThe Shrivelling ApplePut an apple on a windowsill and leave it for a month. For about seventy years, that was the best available scientific explanation for the Himalayas.
- IIITwo Facts That Cored the AppleIn the 1850s, the British survey of India recorded an error it could not explain. The Himalayas — the biggest mountains on Earth — were not pulling their weight.
- IVThe WeathermanIn April 1906, two brothers went up in a hydrogen balloon over northern Germany and stayed aloft for fifty-two and a half hours. The younger one was Alfred Wegener.
- VListening to the InsideIn 1909 an earthquake shook a valley south of Zagreb, and at stations far enough away the waves arrived twice. The man who worked out why was a meteorologist, and what he had found was the floor of the world.
- VIDraining the OceanOn 18 November 1929 an earthquake off Newfoundland snapped twelve transatlantic telegraph cables, one after another, over thirteen hours. Nobody could say what had broken them, because nobody knew what the bottom of the ocean looked like.
- VIIThe Tape RecorderComing 5 November
- VIIIThe Bomb DetectivesComing 12 November
- IXThe Machine NamedComing 19 November