Scientists
Fred Vine
Geophysicist
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Frederick John Vine was an English marine geologist and geophysicist, born in 1939 in Chiswick, London, and died in 2024 in Norwich, Norfolk. He made a key contribution to the theory of plate tectonics by helping establish that the ocean floor spreads outward from mid-ocean ridges, demonstrating that this spreading produces a symmetrical pattern of magnetic reversals frozen into the basalt rock on either side of a ridge. Published with Drummond Matthews as the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis, the finding showed that these parallel magnetic strips could be read like a tape recording of Earth's past magnetic field as one travels away from the ridge crest.
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Vine-Matthews-Morley Hypothesis (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationConcepts Credited: Vine-Matthews-Morley Hypothesis, History section, paragraph naming Vine and Matthews as first to publishQuote, Concepts Credited: Vine-Matthews-Morley Hypothesis, History section, paragraph naming Vine and Matthews as first to publish
Vine and his PhD adviser at Cambridge University, Drummond Hoyle Matthews, were first to publish the theory in September 1963.
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