A picture that changed the world
One of the standard science facts that comes in in polls about general scientific ignorance is that the continents move. More than 80% of people in the US know this, but within living memory it went from loony to controversial to accepted to boring enough for school curriculum.
People noticed the similarity of the African and American coastlines as soon as there were maps of both continents, but the idea of millions of square kilometers of land cruising around the earth seemed rather less plausible than a massive coincidence. This, from NOAA is a modern version of one of the most compelling pieces of evidence. The ocean floor is younger along the mid-Atlantic ridge (and similar lines), and gets older, symmetrically, as you move away from the ridge
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[the sea turtle migration/continental drift story, though? That’s a myth]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Hi,
Thanks for the link. It made me update my turtle article, getting rid of the typos and such.
I love the visual of how the seafloor gets older as you move away from the ridge. There’s nothing more satisfying than a good explanation.
11 years ago
By the way, here’s the original research paper. I’m just a humble science writer, reporting second-hand about the mtDNA findings
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC286514/
11 years ago