Lawrence Morley 1920-2013

Lawrence Morley 1920-2013

R.I.P.

Morley was a pioneering geophysicist whose 92-year voyage helped put much of what we know about Canada on the map.
Perhaps his greatest professional accomplishment came on the international stage as the result of a snobbish intellectual brush-off.
In 1963, Morley submitted a paper, based on his earlier University of Toronto doctoral thesis, to Nature magazine and later The Journal of Geophysical Research. It postulated that magnetic imprinting of rocks (later called paleomagnetism) could be used to map out changes in the magnetic fields of ocean sea beds and show that the seabed floors are spreading as a result of continental drift.
The concept of continental drift had been rejected since it was first put forward in 1912 by German geophysicist Alfred Wegener. It was still considered quack science when Morley mailed off his paper in early 1963 for publication.
The journal’s rejection of his idea is documented in Bill Bryson’s popular book, A Short History of Nearly Everything:
“In what has become a famous snub, the editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research told (Morley): such speculations make interesting talk at cocktail parties, but it is not the sort of thing that should be published under serious scientific aegis.”
“One geologist later described it as, ‘probably the most significant paper in the earth sciences ever to be denied publication’.”
Eight months later, Nature published the same hypothesis by British geophysicists Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews. What is now known as the Morley-Vine-Drummond hypothesis became the first scientific test of the continental drift theory, which gave birth to the science of plate tectonics.

Texto copiado de Geophysicist made Canada a world leader in remote sensing