Tuzo WilsonBorn 24 Oct 1908; died 15 Apr 1993 at age 84. John Tuzo Wilson was a Canadian geologist and geophysicistwho determinedthe underlying structure of faults, continents across the globe. From the early 1960s, Wilson revolutionized the emerging field of plate tectonics. He coined the word“plate” for the rigid subdivisions of the Earth's crust of both land and ocean beds. By 1963, he identified some of the earliest evidence supporting the sea-floor spreading hypothesis of Harry H. Hess. Wilson showed the relationship that islands were older for those further away from mid-ocean ridge. One of his important new ideas (1965) was for transform faults, where plate boundaries meet in a series of of offsets, and the plates slide alongside past each other without any creation or destruction of the crust. It is a conservative plate boundary beecause neither plate slides under the other.« |
