摘要：John Tuzo Wilson probably had a greater influence on the development of the earth sciences than any geologist since William Smith and Charles Lapworth. Prior to the early 1960’s, he was a staunch anti-drifter but, in 1965, he pulled together many threads to create a cohesive paradigm that embraced continental drift, sea-floor spreading, subduction, and very large motions on transcurrent faults that defined the bound- aries of and sites of relative motion between plates, the basis of what would come to be known as plate tectonics. Implicit in his analysis was the torsional rigidity of plates. Torsional rigidity means that plates have sufficient strength to avoid dis- tortion in map view although they may be distorted along their edges (plate boundaries) and are more easily distorted by flex- ure in cross-section. Apart from the well-known contributions of Wegener (1929), Holmes (1931), Griggs (1939), Creer et al. (1958), Hess (1962), Runcorn (1962), Heezen (1960), Dietz (1961), and Vine and Matthews (1963), two lesser known and appreciated observations were instrumental in the formulation of plate tectonics. First, Harry Wellman (1955) already recog- nized that the Alpine Fault in New Zealand joined trenches with opposite polarities and is elongating. Secondly, Bert Quennell (1958) described the sinistral relative motion of Africa with respect to the Arabian Plate along the small circle of the Dead Sea Fault around a rotation pole near Gibraltar, implying torsional rigidity of the adjacent blocks. Simultane- ously with Tuzo’s 1965 paper, Bullard et al. (1965) assumed torsional rigidity to make finite difference rotations around poles of rotation, to achieve fits and minimizing misfits, between the continents around the Atlantic. McKenzie and Parker (1967) described the relative motion among the torsion- ally rigid Pacific, North American, and Gorda plates and the theory of plate tectonics was born. Tuzo’s fundamental role came between 1962 and 1965 in his papers on the Cabot Fault (1962), and interpretations of oceanic islands (1963a) and Hawaii (1963b) as hot-spot tracks, culminating in his definitive 1965 paper that founded plate tectonics and his clever paper (1966) on the Caribbean and Scotia plates moving through gaps between continents and invading ‘innocent’ oceans with rifted margins. Strangely, Tuzo did not use rotation poles to describe relative motion among his global plate mosaic, in spite of the implicit rigidity of plates, even though used, explicitly, by Wellman, Quennell, and Bullard et al. Within a few years, plate tectonics was developed as a quantitative, integrated the- ory by McKenzie and Parker (1967), Morgan (1968), Le Pichon (1968), and Isacks et al. (1968).
