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Geologist Harry Hess *31 saw that convection currents from deep within the earth provided the driving force behind continental drift.
By J. I. Merritt 66
O
n the evening of March 26, 1957, faculty and stu- vary, but in essence this is what he said: Thank you, Bruce,
dents of Princetons Geology Department gathered for a lecture that shakes geology to its very foundations.
in 220 Guyot Hall for a lecture on the latest in a Hesss colleagues, who shared his orthodox views of earth
series of discoveries that were soon to revolutionize the earth history, puzzled over these remarkscould he possibly mean
sciences. Bruce Heezen, a respected geologist from what he said? Three years later they would recall his words
Columbias Lamont Geological Observatory, had been in- when he circulated a paper he had written incorporating
vited to speak on recent evidence from ocean soundings that Heezens concept that the oceans were young and growing.
a continuous rift or valley ran along the crest of an under- Instead of accepting the theory of an expanding earth, how-
water mountain chain known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ever, Hess suggested the following:
Heezen proposed that this rift and others like it, by extrud- The new crustal material created at the mid-ocean ridges
ing magma, or molten lava, had been creating ocean floor was eventually consumed in what he called the jaw crusher
for the last 200-300 million years. Before then, he said, no of deep ocean trenches like those lying along much of the
oceans had existeda single great continent had covered western Pacific basin.
the planet, and the earth had been only about half of its It was convectionthe slow circulation of hot,
present size. semimolten rock from the earths interiorthat powered this
While many in the audience were willing to accept that crustal movement.
rifts indeed existed along the worlds ocean ridges, the idea The continents, which were once welded together but
that the earth had somehow expanded like a balloon to ac- had been split apart by this great convection engine, were fixed
commodate its oceans seemed patently absurd. When Heezen in the earths spreading crust and rode along like rocks im-
finished there was polite applause, followed by silence. Then bedded in moving glacial ice.
Harry Hess *31, the department chairman and Heezens host Thus Hesss grand scheme made sense out of the neat fit of
for the evening, stood up in the back of the room. Accounts land masses such as South America and Africa, long noticed
274 T H E B E S T OF PAW
by geologists and laymen alike but never satisfactorily explained trenches to outer space. Hess championed a project, called
until then. Mohole, to drill four miles deep into the earth, and he was
The Hess paperinnocuously titled History of Ocean Ba- among the select group of geologists to examine the first moon
sins and described by him as an essay in geopoetrywas rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts. And his sense of
eventually published in 1962 as part of a volume honoring justice compelled him, virtually alone among scientists of stat-
Princeton geologist Arthur F. Buddington *16. In the interim, ure, to speak publicly on behalf of the controversial Immanuel
a government geologist named Robert Dietz developed, inde- Velikovskynot because Hess believed Velikovskys crack-
pendently of Hess, a similar theory and applied the term sea- pot theories about a near collision between Earth and Venus
floor spreading to the earths crustal dynamics. Others soon (he didnt) but because, as he told him, You deserve a fair
began building on the framework constructed by Hess and hearing.
Dietz, including two young Princeton geologists, Frederick Vine Although primarily a mineralogist whose reputation be-
and Jason Morgan *64, who would make significant contribu- fore 1960 rested on his studies of silicate rocks, Hess from
tions in their own right to the new science that by 1967 was the beginning of his career maintained a related interest in
known as plate tectonics. the ocean floor. After graduating in 1927 from Yale (where
The model as fleshed out showed that the earths crust was he claimed to have failed his first mineralogy course and was
divided into approximately 20 sections, told he had no future in that field), he
or plates, whose interactions could help took his doctorate at Princeton and in
to explain many long-standing questions 1931 joined an undersea expedition
about mountain building, earthquakes, with the eminent Dutch geophysicist
ore concentrations, and the similarity of Felix Vening Meinesz. During this and
fossils between widely separated conti- subsequent investigations of the ocean
nents. A scientific revolutionowing in bottom, Hess was encouraged by his
no small measure to Hesss insight and mentor on the Princeton faculty, the
leadershipwas underway. A trace of the Pacific floor, obtained by Hess flamboyant Richard M. Dicky Field,
Years after his death, Harry Ham- with a depth recorder aboard the navy ship he an early proponent of deep-sea explo-
commanded in World War II, showing one of
mond Hess remains a larger-than-life the flat-topped seamounts he named guyots,
ration. While no theoretician, the out-
figure. Anecdotes about him abound in after Princeton geologist Arnold Guyot. going Field was a catalyst and organizer
Guyot Hall, the crenellated, turn- who brought together many of the
of-the-century home of the universitys Department of Geo- people, including Hess and Meinesz, who would play critical
logical and Geophysical Sciences, where he was a fixture for 40 roles in the development of plate tectonics.
years. A quiet, unpretentious man with a small mustache and Meinesz, a huge man who could barely squeeze into the tiny
a constantly lit cigarette, he worked out of an office of leg- submarines of his day, was fascinated by the so-called gravity
endary clutter, whose every surface was piled high with pa- anomalies that existed along the trenches of island arcs in the
pers and hydrologic charts. He had tremendous powers of East and West Indies. Using a highly sensitive pendulum
concentration, and his wife, Annette, recalled his ability to gravimeter, he charted the gravitational pull along the ocean
think exclusively about geology from the time he woke up in floor and found, contrary to a fundamental geophysical law,
the morning until he went to bed. The one vacation she could that it was remarkably weaker over the trenches. These anoma-
remember away from geology was their honeymoon on Nan- lies would puzzle Hess and others for three decades but would
tucket: The island has only one rock, and that was brought finally be explained by the new theory of plate tectonics: the
in as a monument. He used to look at it longingly. weakness of gravity over the trenches resulted from the con-
Hess had a wonderfully unpredictable sense of humor. At a vective force that was pulling the edge of the sea floor down
banquet celebrating the end of a field trip to Russia by Ameri- into the earth.
can geologists in 1937, vodka was flowing freely. Suddenly To carry out his work on U.S. submarines Hess joined the
Hess leaped onto the table and proposed a toast: Heres to Navy Reserve, a seemingly routine act but one fraught with
the Revolution! . . . The Hercynian Revolution!a reference later consequences. On the day after the Japanese attack on
to the geological event that had thrust up the Urals. Pearl Harbor he put on the one Navy uniform he owned and
His professional interests ranged from the deepest ocean took the 7:42 a.m. train to New York to volunteer for active
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duty. He was soon in charge of estimating the daily positions The mantle was actually composed of a series of convection
of German submarines in the Atlantic. Later in the war he cells whose boundaries were marked on the surface by ocean
transferred to sea duty, taking part (eventually as captain of ridges and trenches. In an endless cycle, the heated rock in the
the assault transport U.S.S. Cape Johnson) in landings in the cells rose toward the surface, then cooled and descended to a
Marianas, Leyte, Linguayan Gulf, and Iwo Jima. depth where it took on more heat and began to ascend again.
During his time at sea Hess made a remarkable discovery. The mid-ocean ridges could represent the traces of rising limbs
For research purposes he had a special deep-sea fathometer of convection cells, Hess wrote, while the belt of trenches and
installed on his ship and ordered that it be kept on all the time mountains ringing the Pacific would represent descending
during his frequent criss-crossings of the Pacific. He thus ac- limbs. The continents ride passively on mantle material as it
cumulated some 250,000 miles of soundings and found that comes to the surface at the crest of the ridge and then move
the Pacific bottom was studded with at least 160 flat-topped laterally away from it.
seamounts rising to within 3,000 feet of the surface. He called While new evidence and theories have emerged since Hesss
these structures drowned ancient islands and named them paper to show that the driving mechanism is far more compli-
guyots, after Arnold Guyot, the Swiss geologist who founded cated than the simple model he outlined, the basic concept of
Princetons department in the mid-19th century. convection continues to offer the best explanation for conti-
nental drift.
from Princeton) shared an office in Guyot Hall with Jason of the earths surface as the Afar Triangle in East Africa. At
Morgan, a young geophysicist who would soon make brilliant this and similar areas, according to the theory, an upwelling
additions of his own to the new theory that was indeed, as plume forms a bulge in the crust. More pressure on the bulge
Hess had prophesied nearly 10 years earlier, shaking geology causes it to crack, frequently along three lines radiating from
to its foundations. a central point and approximately 120 degrees apartthus
the convergence near Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia of the Afri-
M organ provided a further clue to understanding the can Rift Valley, the Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden, all of which
earths surface dynamics by applying a mathematical form the border of diverging plates.
law called Eulers theorem, which governs the motion of rigid Geophysicists have also argued that a series of plumes suffi-
units on a sphere, to long gashes in the ocean bottom. These ciently close together would form a single volcanic rift like the
gashes, known as fracture zones, run at right angles to one that splits the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is also believed that
mid-ocean ridges and are apparently connected to the phe- sometimes, when a plume cracks the surface, one of the three
nomenon of sea-floor spreading. Indeed, geologists had al- lines becomes inactive and forms the basin for a river. Evi-
ready matched up the magnetic striping patterns on either dence exists to suggest that the Amazon, Mississippi, and Rhine
side of certain Pacific fracture zones and found they are off- rivers resulted this way.
set, indicating that sections of once-continuous ocean bot- Unfortunately, we still have little direct evidence concerning
tom had been rent apart and separated what goes on deep within the earth, so
in some cases by nearly a thousand Morgans hypothesis remains just that.
miles. There may never be a way of actually
Morgan noticed that groups of frac- proving the existence of plumes, says
ture zones might in fact be segments of Morgan. In sciences like chemistry or
small circles (like lines of longitude on physics, he explains, discrete experi-
a globe), suggesting a common axis ments can be designed to test hypoth-
as a graduate student was present at the 1957 Heezen lecture accomplishments and knew him by sight, but they never met.)
and has followed the development of plate tectonics ever since. The revolutionary synthesis achieved by Hess can be traced
Deffeyes points out that, while other universities and several to certain personal and professional qualities. He was a very
oceanographic institutes collected much of the data that ulti- able person at the right spot at the right time, and he had enough
mately transformed our picture of the world, it was Princeton confidence in himself to make the jump, says Sheldon Judson
and Cambridge that led in interpreting the raw findings and 40, the department chairman. There was also the breadth and
turning them into coherent theory. diversity of his experience, which was uniquevery different
Weve been criticized at times for not generating the pri- from any other geologists at the time. This included, in the
mary data that you get from doing things like radioactive age 1930s, his submarine gravity work over ocean trenches and
dating, spectrometer work, or running an oceanographic ship, land-based studies of peridodite, a volcanic rock that later turned
he says. Other places were collecting and examining the de- out to be a primary component of the ocean floor. Following
tails, but Cambridge and Princeton were looking at the larger his wartime discovery of guyots, Hess continued in the Navy
picture. Reserve (eventually making rear admiral) and directed naval
efforts at sea-floor mapping. He had, adds Judson, the whole