From Strata to Plates: Ten Geologists Who Read the Earth

English geologist credited with the first detailed, nationwide geological map of any country. He documented the principle of faunal succession in England in the first decade of the 19th century, yet was overlooked at first and held for a time in debtors prison before late recognition as the father of English geology.

Cuvier established extinction as a scientific fact and, with Alexandre Brongniart, studied the strata of the Paris basin in a way that set out the basic principles of biostratigraphy. He also became the leading advocate of catastrophism, the view that periodic catastrophic floods wiped out species.

Cuvier partner in the Paris basin survey, carried out between 1804 and 1811. Their Essai of 1811 used the fossil content of successive layers, not rock type alone, to reconstruct the basin marine and freshwater history, making it a founding work of biostratigraphy.

Working from Welsh rock strata, this geologist and Anglican priest proposed the Cambrian period in 1835, in a joint publication in which Roderick Murchison proposed the Silurian. In 1840 the two proposed the Devonian, which led to the Great Devonian Controversy.

The Austrian geologist hypothesised the supercontinent Gondwana, proposed in 1861, and the Tethys Ocean, two vanished features of the old map of the world. He also introduced the concept of eustasy, the idea of worldwide sea level change.

After a decade from 1875 exploring the plateaus of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, Dutton coined the term isostasy in an 1882 footnote for the principle that crustal elevation reflects density, with lighter material floating higher on a denser, plastic substratum.

Holmes pioneered radiometric dating of minerals, giving earth scientists the first reliable way to fix the age of rocks. He was also the first to grasp the mechanical and thermal implications of convection within the mantle, an insight that helped lead to acceptance of plate tectonics.

The Canadian geophysicist argued that the age progression of the Hawaiian islands records a plate sliding over a fixed mantle hotspot, and that mid-ocean ridges are offset by a then-unrecognized kind of fault, the transform. A late convert to the new theory, he became one of its most effective champions.

In the late 1960s Morgan related the magnetic anomalies on both sides of mid-ocean ridges to seafloor spreading and plate tectonics, and his 1968 theory has been called a major milestone of 20th century American science. From 1971 he developed Wilson plume idea into the theory of convection plumes in the lower mantle.

A close colleague of J. Tuzo Wilson during a visiting professorship at Toronto in 1972 and 1973, Burke named in 1975 the recurring pattern of ocean basins opening and closing along old continental sutures the Wilson cycle, tying the story back to its starting idea.