A short history of marine geology

including some of the development of the theory of

plate tectonics

1
Why history?
• Marine Geology is a young field – and some of the “old”
ideas might have a “come back”

• To be aware of the difficulties and uncertainties in deciphering

dynamic processes in the ocean

• To appreciate the development of global plate tectonics, an

excellent example of how science works

2
Early/mid-19th century ideas
• The ocean floors were featureless and uninteresting “deserts of
the deep-sea”

• The deep oceans were without life

3
What was the basis of these ideas?

• The deep ocean was very difficult to observe

– difficulties of navigation
– difficulties of measuring depth
– difficulties of taking sea floor samples

• Technical advances were necessary to overcome these

problems and to collect sufficient data for new ideas

4
 1850-1870
Transatlantic Cooperation

1857-1866 Cyrus Field & Isambard

Kingdom Brunel

On July 27th 1866 the second transatlantic

cable crossed 5000 km from Ireland to New
Foundland (the first one failed in 1864).

Brunel
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 (1858)
The first industrial
stimulus: the
transatlantic cables

Cyrus West Field, US businessman, teams up with

William Thomson (UK), the future Lord Kelvin :
first industry-academia cooperation on the ocean

The Great Eastern, floating palace

(Jules Verne’s Une ville flottante)
reshaped into a giant cable layer.
Landing of the new (first) cable in
6
Newfoundland, 9 september 1864
The depth of the oceans

First known attempt:

• Magellan (early 1500’s) tried to measure the depth of the sea

floor in the central Pacific but it was too deep for his sounding
lines

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Measuring depth

• The original and long-standing (until the 1920’s) method was

“plumbing the depths” by lowering a lead way on a line

• Problems:
– very long ropes were necessary, not available on many
ships
– very laborious/time consuming to hoist the long heavy rope
– bottom impact difficult to detect with the heavy rope
– the long time of lowering resulted in big errors due to
current movements

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Measuring depth

• Development of new technology was driven by the need for

bathymetric information for laying trans-Atlantic telephone
cables

• A major advance in the second half of the 19th century (1870)

was the introduction off steel cable
– it is lighter (because thinner) per length unit than rope
– it is less likely to break than hemp ropes

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 1870-1910
“Oceanic Golden Age”
- wireline depth measurements

1891 Murray & Renard - description

of sediments of ocean basins and
Continental Margins based on the
“Challenger expedition 1872-
1876”

1904 Fridtjof Nansen - formation of

the Continental Shelf and Polar
Seas based on the “Fram
expedition 1893-1896”

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First bathymetric map of an ocean

• Matthew Fontaine Maury, U.S. Navy lieutenant (“Father of

Oceanography”), was a leader in bathymetric surveying for the
Navy
• Based on less than 200 soundings, he presented the Mid-
Atlantic Ridge morphology
• He published in 1855 the map on the next slide. This map
presented the first indication of the the shelf, continental rise,
abyssal plain and a Mid-Oceanic Ridge.

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Maury’s map of the North Atlantic

Open University, 1989 12

 Maury - bathymetric section between
Tampico and Africa

vertical exaggeration ~ 500x Open University, 1989 13

The Fram Expedition
Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930)

Expedition lasted from 1893-1896

Nansen discussed problems such as:

• sea level change
• glacial erosion
• deposition
• continental slope
• shelf sediment dynamics

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The Challenger Expedition

• Lasted over three years

(1872-1876)

• Organized and funded by

the British government

• Leader: Charles Wyville

Thompson, University of
Edinburgh
HMS Challenger

15
The route of HMS Challenger

Open University, 1989 16

HMS Challenger results

17
Challenger - geological results

18
Turn of the century
• Work continued on bathymetry. The first General Bathymetric
Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) was printed in 1903

• Some work was done on surface sediments, but this was

entirely based on dredging and core samples

• Radioactivity was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie. This

had fundamental impact on earth sciences later on, when it was
used for absolute age dating

19
1915 - Continental drift
• Alfred Wegener, an Austrian
(german) meteorologist
proposed in “The origins of
continents and oceans” that
continents were previously
joined in a single land mass and
had been drifting apart since
180 Ma ago

• His work was inspired by the

long suspected fit between
Africa and South America, but Alfred Wegener (1880-1930)
it was rejected because he could
not come up with a reasonable
mechanism
The Sea Floor, 1989 20
Wegener’s evidence

• Fit of continents

• Paleontological (fossil)
observations

• Geological observations
(rock types, coal deposits)

• Indications of glaciations

This dynamic Earth, USGS 21

Wegener’s problems
• Major opposition to Wegener’s ideas was due to his lack of
a plausible physical mechanism to account for the drift - he
proposed that continents plowed through the ocean floor

• A previous explanation for the geological and fossil

evidence was equally implausible, involving previously
emergent land bridges

• A major impediment to the acceptance of Wegener’s

hypothesis was a lack of adequate knowledge of the
oceans.

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Wegener’s prophecy

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 1920-1930
“Exploring the oceans”
- the echosounding revolution

1929 Dansgard – Monaco Oceanographic

Institution increases European
Continental Margin geological
and oceanographic mapping

1925-1927 R/V Meteor Atlantic expedition

1934 R/V Discovery expedition
1935 R/V Snellius expedition
R/V Armauer Hansen

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Echo sounding

The Sea Floor, 1989 25

 1930-1940
Foundation of marine geology institutions
and mapping of the ocean floor

1930 Vening Meinesz – gravity investi-

gations for crustal studies
1933 Holtedahl - Shepard discussion:
Norwegian Channel due to glaciation
or tectonics?
1932 Trask - marine environments in which
petroleum accumulates
1938 Shepard & Beard – submarine canyons
1938 Ewing & Vine – seismic refraction
Holtedahl

26
Marine gravity measurements

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 1940-1950
Sampling the ocean floor

1941 Emery and Dietz – gravity coring

instruments
1942 Sverdrup - the ocean’s physics
and chemistry
1946 Hess – flat topped submarine
volcanoes (guyots): trigger for
sea floor spreading ideas
Guyot development

1947 Kullenberg – improvements of sediment sampling

1947-1948 Swedish RV Albatross expedition
1948 Shepard - submarine geology

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Sediment coring

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 1950-1960
“Evolutionary models for planet earth”
1956 Bullard et al., heat flow
1956 Runcorn, paleomagnetic
establishing divergent drift between
North America and Europe
1958 McClure et al., single channel
reflection seismic recordings
1958 THE GENEVA CONFERENCE ON THE
LAW OF THE SEA
1959 Ewing – Norwegian Margin seismic
refraction studies showed that more
Maurice Ewing (1903-1976) than 4000 m of sediments overly
basement
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 1960-1970
“plate tectonics and sea-floor spreading”
hydrocarbon exploration in Europe
international Deep-Sea Drilling

1960 Commercial exploration in the North Sea

1961 Dietz – continent and ocean basin
evolution
1962 Hess – history of ocean basins
1962 First Atlantic US Margin programme
1963 Bouma – Turbidite sequences
Transform faults

1965 Wilson – transform faults, oceanic ridges, and mag-

netic anomalies
1965 Bullard – the fit of the continents around the Atlantic
1965 Heezen & Tharp – tectonic fabric of the Atlantic

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Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp
- physiographic maps of the oceans

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Sea floor spreading and magnetic
stripes

This dynamic Earth, USGS 33

Magnetic anomalies - symmetry

• This fairly complicated

version was the first such
data collected (Wilson,
1965, Vine, 1966)
• Observation of magnetic
anomalies on the sea floor -
alternating strips of rock
with normal and reversed
polarity, symmetric around
ridges
This dynamic Earth, USGS 34
1960-1970
“plate tectonics and sea-floor spreading”
hydrocarbon exploration in Europe
international Deep-Sea Drilling

1965 First continental shelf committee in

Norway, planning of seismic investigations
1966 Vine – sea-floor spreading from
magnetic anomalies
1967 Menard – sea-floor spreading and
topography
Sea-floor spreading magnetic anomalies

1967 Seismic studies off Norway indicate thick sediments

1968 LePichon – sea-floor spreading and continental drift
1968 Deep-Sea Drilling Project
1969 Ekofisk field discovered after 33 dry holes

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Magnetic reversals
• Meanwhile, the existence
and timescale of magnetic
field reversals was being
independently explored,
first on continental lavas,
then on marine sediments
and basalts

• The plot shows magnetic

reversals and their dates for
the last 3.5 Ma
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The 1960’s sea floor spreading

37
Continued...

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Deep sea drilling

Photo: This dynamic Earth, USGS 39

Crucial findings of the first DSDP
legs

The Solid Earth, Fowler 40

Other geophysical support for
plate tectonics
• Global seismic networks for nuclear test monitoring
revealed a pattern in earthquake distribution: the plate
boundaries

41
 1970-1980
“International decade of Ocean Exploration”
declared by the president of the United States

1970 Beloussov - against sea-floor spreading

1970 East Atlantic Continental Margin
Programme “Cambridge symposium”
1972 Walton – concept of 3-D seismic surveys
1972 Talwani & Eldholm – the evolution of
the Norwegian Margin and the
Norwegian-Greenland Sea

1973 Norwegian Petroleum Directorate founded

1977 Vail et al. – seismic stratigraphy and sea level curve
1978 McKenzie’s simple shear model
1979 Sclater – the history of the Atlantic
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 1980-1990
“Geodynamics and Ocean Drilling”
1980 Emery – Continental Margin
classification and petroleum
1981/1982 Hinz / Mutter: discussion
of seaward dipping reflectors
1981 Le Pichon – Passive Margins:
a formation model
1985 Wernicke’s pure shear model
JOIDES Resolution

1985 Ocean Drilling Program

1987 Passive Margin Legs 103 (non-volcanic
Galicia Bank) and 104 (volcanic Vøring Plateau)

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 1990-2000
“Quantification of margin
processes”
1993 Mutter – Margins declassified
1992 Nansen Arctic Drilling Programme
1993-1999 European North Atlantic
Margin Programme
1994 UN convention on the Law of the Seas
1997 Sandwell & Smith: global gravity re-
mote sensing
1997 Production of oil in the deep-water
Campos Basin, Brazil
1999 Ocean Margin hydrodynamic systems
1999 Ocean Margin Deep-Water Research
Consortium and Joint Industry Partners
Satellite gravity

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Quo vadis?
• Unravelling the mechanisms behind plate tectonics
• Understanding the details of submarine features for example
major hydrocarbon provinces
• Geohazards on margins: (e.g. seismogenic zones)
• Sediment Dynamics
• Margin response to rapid climate change
• Fluid systems on margins: quantification, visualization, and
impact assessment
• Margin’s Bacterial World: from deep to shallow biosphere
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Norwegian marine scientists
• Nansen, Fridtjof (marine zoology, geology) 1890 proposed to build an
ice-going vessel – Maud.
• Bjerknes, Vilhelm (atmosphere & ocean circulation), direct a new
geophysical institute in Leipzig, Germany
• Sverdrup, Harald Ulrik (born 1888 in Sogndal) (atmosphere & ocean
circulation) Director Scripps, USA
• Sars, G.O. (Charles Wyville Thomson travels to Christiania (Oslo) to investigate the “living fossils”
collected by Michael Sars’ son on the Norwegian margin, off the Lofoten – crinoids) (marine fossils)

Questions:
1. Which of the names is used for a research centre, a research vessel, or a oceanographic unit?
2. Explain the unit for water masses.

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Suggested reading
• Look at “This dynamic Earth”, an online text from the USGS
at http://www.usgs.gov/publications/text/dynamic.html

• Read through “Exploring the ocean basins with satellite

altimeter data”, an online text by Dave Sandwell and Walter
Smith at
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/announcements/text_predict.H
TML

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