NewScientist Magazine, 17th September 2005
By Richard Fortey, senior researcher at the Natural History Museum in London and visiting professor of palaeobiology at the University of Oxford.
Snippets taken from the print edition, article is available online here (subscription required)
"What Darwinian evolution did for our understanding of the biological world, plate tectonics has performed in the sphere of geology. It is a theory of everything... Earth is nothing more than a coarse mosaic of rocky slabs atop a viscous ocean of magma, and the geology of the past 40 years has been all about exploring this deeper understanding.
There is no part of the Earth sciences untouched by plate tectonics... plate movements underlie major events in human societies. It seems more and more likely that the demise of whole societies - including that of the Vikings - was ultimately controlled by climate change induced by volcanic activity... Think how human history has been influenced by the quest for metals: the power of gold and silver to shape empires; the supply of copper or iron for utensils or warfare; or in the nuclear age, radioactive elements for peaceful or military use...
Earth is some 4.5 billion years old, and more than three-quarters of that immense history can be understood and even mapped using plate tectonics... Far from being a 'dead science', plate tectonics is the underpinning of our living, moving planet. Earth, like life, has evolved, and the plates provide the language of that evolution, just as the genes speak for the evolution of organisms."