ER’s recent inquiry concerning current controversies in Geology has had me doing a lot of thinking but not a lot of writing.

Plate Tectonics was a true scientific revolution. I have been fortunate to have learned from many “old timers” who were in their early careers when the revolution took place. They all remember when they first had the “ah ha” moment, when the evidence suddenly supported one radical model over the accepted wisdom. As it turns out, they were never really comfortable with the accepted model. The Geosynclinal model worked, at certain scales, when it came to describing geologic structures, but when it came to the big picture it was unsatisfactory. But when the topography of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was revealed, and the magnetic stripes of the oceanic crust leapt off the maps, geologists were delighted, and went to work.

As I have been trying how to best organize my thoughts about how Greenstone Belts don’t quite fit into the Plate Tectonic Model and how their structures may be mis-interpreted by trying to fit them into this model, I came across this recent article:

When Geology Left Solid Ground

It’s quite a good essay and saves me 4700 thousand words in background information. I’m going to look for other articles by this author, she’s good.