Plate Tectonics

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the science of plate tectonics revolutionised our understanding of the planet on which we live. America is getting further away from Europe. This is not a political statement but a geological fact. Just as the Pacific is getting smaller, the Red Sea bigger, the Himalayas are still going up and one day the Horn of Africa will be a large island. This is the theory of plate tectonics, a revolutionary idea in 20th century geology that claimed the continents of Earth were dancing to the music of deep time. A dance of incredible slowness, yet powerful enough to throw up the mountains and pour away the oceans.Plate tectonics, the idea that the earth’s surface moved on a carpet of molten magma, constituted a genuine scientific revolution in geology. It explained why mountains appeared and why earth quakes occurred; it explained the curious distribution of fossils across the globe and finally solved the age old conundrum of why continents such as Africa and South America appeared to fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Plate tectonics has made geologists, and many more besides, profoundly re-think what the Earth was, how it worked and how it related to all the things in it.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Richard Corfield 10 episodes
  Visiting Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University
• Joe Cann No other episodes
  Senior Fellow in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds
• Lynne Frostick No other episodes
  Director of the Hull Environment Research Institute and Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Hull

Related episodes

• The Geological Formation of Britain
  
  22 Oct, 2009 550 Earth sciences and geology
• The KT Boundary
  
  23 Jun, 2005 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• Catastrophism
  
  30 Jan, 2014 550 Earth sciences and geology
• Ageing the Earth
  
  20 Nov, 2003 550 Earth sciences and geology
• Early Geology
  
  12 Apr, 2012 550 Earth sciences and geology
• The Earth’s Origins
  
  5 Jul, 2001 500 Science
• Seismology
  
  10 Mar, 2022 550 Earth sciences and geology
• History as Science
  
  11 Mar, 1999 900 History
• Oceanography
  
  22 Nov, 2001 550 Earth sciences and geology
• The Cambrian Period
  
  17 Feb, 2005 560 Fossils and prehistoric life

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b008q0sp

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008q0sp

Auto-category: 551.1 (Geology, hydrology, meteorology)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. America is getting further away from Europe.