YET THEY MOVE:

Theirs is the Earth, and all that's in it: The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey (The Economist, Mar 25th 2004)

Mr Fortey, whose day job is as a paleontologist at London's Natural History Museum, skilfully interweaves the history of geology with the history of the planet which that science attempts to describe. In particular, he describes the century-long birth-pangs of plate tectonics. This is the theory, now backed by so much evidence that its overthrow is but the remotest of possibilities, that the face of the Earth is divided into, and sculpted by the movements of, immense and rigid slabs of rock known as plates. The borders between these plates are the mountain ranges and ocean trenches that snake across the Earth's surface.

In Mr Fortey's eyes, everything in geology—from the highest of mountains to the smallest of crystals—can be traced back to the movements of plates. He illustrates this with lucid descriptions of parts of the world with which he is familiar: the bay of Naples, the Alps, Hawaii, Newfoundland and many others. In some of these places, plates are jostling for position, throwing up mountain ranges and volcanoes as they do so. Others, now quiet, mark the sites of such struggles in the distant past. It is possible to read the rocks in these quiet places and reach back in time to reconstruct ancient continents and oceans quite unlike those which exist today.

Meanwhile, the human struggle to show that continents move around, split up and recombine was every bit as titanic as the struggle for space of the plates themselves. The names of long-forgotten geologists litter the pages. Eduard Suess assembled much of the data that showed the continents must have moved, but could not bring himself to draw that awesome conclusion. Alfred Wegener stuck his neck out to speak the truth, and had his professional head cut off for his pains. The same almost happened to Arthur Holmes, but he lived long enough to see the idea proved beyond reasonable doubt.